Building a Swarm Client Inside UEFI Firmware for Bootloaders

Chris Hobcroft presented findings from building a Swarm client that runs inside UEFI firmware before any operating system exists, using libp2p, Noise, yamux, and BMT verification in no_std Rust, single-threaded, with a fixed heap. The client pulls the kernel, rootfs, and clients like Geth and Lighthouse by hash from public Swarm storage. The presentation highlighted three transferable results. First, authority can be money-grade without a chain on the boot path, as the machine verifies m-of-n ECDSA signatures over a manifest, allowing it to boot even when Ethereum is unreachable. Second, it covered real numbers for pulling an operating system from a public mesh with nothing seeding it. Third, it addressed a resource leak that starved the log transport, which generalized beyond the boot process. The talk also included a scorecard detailing what remains centralized, starting with GitHub.