A mechanism that allows firmware to be updated in a secure manner is discussed. Two attributes are used in the actual ROM to refer to a Virtual ROM module. The two attributes are a version attribute and a reference to a separate module that is capable of validating updates. The update process updates the message digest associated with the first Virtual ROM module and the version attribute associated with the first Virtual ROM module. The update process also produces a new copy of the corresponding file (that may be located on the local disk) that when hashed will “match” the new message digest.