From BIOS to UEFI and Project Mu

UEFI is the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface.

It is a specification for a software program to connect a computer's firmware to its operating system.  Its origins came from Intel's Itanium days (64 bit microprocessor family launched in 2001, originally known as IA-64, with clock speeds ranging from 733MHz to 2.66GHz), where BIOS was found to be too restrictive for the larger server platforms being targeted by Itanium. It was then called Intel Boot Initiative and later EFI or Extensible Firmware Interface.

The first open source implementation of UEFI was released by Intel in 2004 and named Tiano. In December 2018, Microsoft forked Tiano and created Project Mu.

UEFI is expected to eventually replace BIOS.

Thinking TPM in Windows 10

If you have tinkered with Settings in Windows 10 you may be familiar with TPM. Even if not, read on. TPM, or Trusted Platform Module, is an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 11889) for a secure cryptoprocessor, which can execute cryptographic operations on a chip and includes some level of tamper-resistance. TPM was developed by a consortium founded in 2003 called the Trusted Computing Group (who maintain over 90 specifications aimed at building trusted computing environments).