Securing UEFI in the Age of AI: The Forgotten Footholds

October 4, 2026 • Conference Paper

By
Vijay S. Sarvepalli

UEFI remains an attractive attack surface. In the AI era, accelerating computing power and vulnerability discovery make securing UEFI—and leveraging AI to defend it—more critical than ever.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

DOI (Digital Object Identifier)

10.1145/3842651.3850024

Topic or Tag

Abstract

UEFI quietly underpins the trust model of modern computing, yet remains one of the least understood and least monitored software layers in the stack. As AI systems increasingly depend on trusted hardware initialization, provisioning, and teardown, firmware becomes an even more attractive foothold for advanced adversaries seeking persistence and invisibility beneath the operating system. This keynote explores enduring UEFI attack surfaces, from chain-of-trust failures to NVRAM misuse, and examines why modern AI-driven security research still struggles to meaningfully analyze firmware ecosystems. The talk concludes with a call to action for both the firmware and AI security communities to better protect the foundations of trusted compute.