Poettering: Brave new trusted boot world [LWN.net]

Poettering: Brave new trusted boot world

Posted Oct 3, 2023 19:13 UTC (Tue) by kreijack (guest, #43513)
In reply to: Poettering: Brave new trusted boot world by mjg59
Parent article: Poettering: Brave new trusted boot world

> PCR 7 only contains data that can be pre-calculated, and it includes the cert that Shim uses to verify the payload. So a distro that includes this support can have different PCR 7 measurements to one that doesn't, and can assert that it does the PCR 11 measurement.

You should remove all the keys (even the Microsoft key ) from the uefi-bios except the one that allow your shim to work, otherwise anything that was signed with (e.g.) Microsoft key may break the protection...

From the points above it seems to me that the PCR11 signature of an UKI file, is secure only in a strongly constrained environment, i.e. where it is possible to be sure that all 'bootloader chain' is secure. This is not impossible, but it is less practical than seemed in the beginning.

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Poettering: Brave new trusted boot world

Posted Oct 3, 2023 20:08 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

> You should remove all the keys (even the Microsoft key ) from the uefi-bios except the one that allow your shim to work, otherwise anything that was signed with (e.g.) Microsoft key may break the protection...

How? If anything is signed with a different cert chain (even if it's a shim signed with the Microsoft key, it will then measure the vendor cert before booting the second stage) then the PCR 7 measurement will be different and you won't be able to unseal the material.

> From the points above it seems to me that the PCR11 signature of an UKI file, is secure only in a strongly constrained environment, i.e. where it is possible to be sure that all 'bootloader chain' is secure.

The alternative is to seal to PCRs 0-5+11. This doesn't rely on any sort of secure boot chain but does increase fragility over firmware updates or some security-relevant configuration changes.

Poettering: Brave new trusted boot world

Posted Oct 4, 2023 17:38 UTC (Wed) by kreijack (guest, #43513) [Link]

> > You should remove all the keys (even the Microsoft key ) from the uefi-bios except the one that allow your shim to work, otherwise anything that was signed with (e.g.) Microsoft key may break the protection...

> How? If anything is signed with a different cert chain (even if it's a shim signed with the Microsoft key, it will then measure the vendor cert before booting the second stage) then the PCR 7 measurement will be different and you won't be able to unseal the material.

Ok, I missed the fact that PCR7 measures the PK/KEK/db and *the "specific certificates used to validate each boot application"* [1].

But this means that the boot application have to be signed by a non public 'private key'; the same is true for the UKI.
Otherwise the user need to deploy a host-specific certificate to sign the uki.

> > From the points above it seems to me that the PCR11 signature of an UKI file, is secure only in a strongly constrained environment, i.e. where it is possible to be sure that all 'bootloader chain' is secure.

> The alternative is to seal to PCRs 0-5+11. This doesn't rely on any sort of secure boot chain but does increase fragility over firmware updates or some security-relevant configuration changes.

[1] from https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Trusted_Platform_Module