Re: [GIT PULL] Kernel lockdown for secure boot

[Kees Cook]

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 9:45 AM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 9:29 AM, Matthew Garrett <mjg59@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 8:11 AM Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> Can you explain that much more clearly?  I'm asking why booting via
>>> UEFI Secure Boot should enable lockdown, and I don't see what this has
>>> to do with kexec.  And "someone blacklist[ing] your key in the
>>> bootloader" sounds like a political issue, not a technical issue.
>>
>> A kernel that allows users arbitrary access to ring 0 is just an
>> overfeatured bootloader. Why would you want secure boot in that case?
>
> To get a chain of trust.  I can provision a system with some public
> keys, stored in UEFI authenticated variables, such that the system
> will only boot a signed image.  That signed image, can, in turn, load
> a signed (or hashed or otherwise verfified) kernel and a verified
> initramfs.  The initramfs can run a full system from a verified (using
> dm-verity or similar) filesystem, for example.  Now it's very hard to
> persistently attack this system.  Chromium OS does something very much
> like this, except that it doesn't use UEFI as far as I know.  So does
> iOS, and so do some Android versions.

Correct, Chrome OS does not use UEFI, and we still want this patch
series, as it plugs all the known "intentional" escalation paths from
uid-0 to ring-0. Happily, that means all the politics around the UEFI
and Secure Boot case can be ignored, because those issues are specific
to Secure Boot, not the lockdown series. (They are _related_, sure,
but lockdown isn't only about Secure Boot -- it's just that SB is one
of the widely deployed implementations of this kind of
trust-chain-booting-thing. Chrome OS and Android's Verified Boot do
similar things and have the same expectations about the uid-0/ring-0
separation.)

The goal for that bright line on Chrome OS and Android is to stop
attack persistence. We want to know that a reboot onto a new kernel
and OS image will actually result in getting the desired system state,
and that any attack on persistent system data (even for things running
with full root privileges) can't result in using kernel interfaces to
gain kernel control. This isn't expected to be _perfect_, since
nothing is. But it creates a place to work from. The idea that uid-0
is NOT ring-0 is still relatively new, so the existing designs in the
kernel aren't well suited to building that distinction. I view this
series as a solid first step to getting there, though.

-Kees

-- 
Kees Cook
Pixel Security