In the case of Microsoft Windows and certain Linux distributions, this concern is not just theory. It is also a very concrete reality. Piotr Bania has put together a proof of concept, a boot compromise tool called Kon-Boot, which so far has been tested and confirmed to work on at least four Linux distribution releases and a slew of common MS Windows releases.

There’s a lot of debate over what constitutes a “secure” operating system. The debates seem to become most heated when people compare the Big Three of home desktop OSes — Microsoft Windows, Apple MacOS X, and the Linux family of operating systems. Of course, as I pointed out in Is Linux the most secure OS?, it’s difficult to convincingly offer a definitive declaration that any given operating system is “more secure” than another.

OpenBSD is rightly proud of its record of only two identified remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in default configuration through its entire stable release history, but even this is not proof positive that an OS is the “most secure”, considering that security needs change from one system deployment to another.

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