Re: [GIT PULL] Kernel lockdown for secure boot

[Kees Cook]

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 12:01 PM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 11:45 AM, Kees Cook <keescook@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> But wouldn't Chrome OS possibly want to lock down kernel memory write
> vectors but not read vectors?  After all, debugging is useful even on
> Chrome OS.

Chrome OS absolutely wants to block writing. We also want to block
reading as much as we possibly can, though yes we bump up against
debugging in that quest. But those cases are manageable and specific,
IMO.

-Kees

-- 
Kees Cook
Pixel Security