Secure Boot was designed to solve one of the most fundamental security problems in computing: how to ensure that only trusted software starts your machine. But like any architectural decision, it came with its own trade-offs, and its own technical debt.

In this episode of Technical Debt: Design, Risk and Beyond, Maxim Silaev and Nikita Golovko explore Secure Boot as a case study in how solving one kind of debt often creates another. Maxim explains how the pre-Secure Boot world fragmented BIOS loaders, vendor-specific boot hacks, and no shared trust model, which was itself a form of technical debt waiting to explode. Nikita then breaks down how Secure Boot centralized trust and improved integrity, while introducing new risks: reliance on external signing authorities, firmware lock-ins, and single points of failure.

Together, they unpack:

• How Secure Boot actually works, and why the world before it was pure architectural chaos
• Why "centralized trust" solved one problem but created another
• How dependency on Microsoft’s signing keys became an industry-scale risk
• What communication failures between OEMs, OS vendors, and users taught us about architectural assumptions
• How AI might help us audit and secure firmware chains in the future

Whether you’re in firmware, architecture, or security, this episode shows how even the most well-intentioned design can accumulate invisible debt, and why architecture is as much about people and trust as it is about code.

Next episode: How to design architecture specifically to minimize technical debt from the start.