Plan of action for Secure Boot support

[Cyril Brulebois]

Hi Ben,

Ben Hutchings <ben at decadent.org.uk> (2013-08-13):
> Colin Watson and Stefano Rivera talked about how Ubuntu had implemented
> Secure Boot and what they believed were the requirements.
> 
> Apparently, the Secure Boot spec requires each stage of the boot code
> to validate signatures only until ExitBootServices() is called.  (At
> this point the firmware makes some parts of its non-volatile
> configuration inaccessible.)
> 
> While some users would probably like to be able to 'lock down' the
> kernel, requiring signed modules and disabling other kernel features
> that allow code injection, this does not seem to be a requirement for
> booting on systems that implement Windows 8 logo requirements in the
> usual way, i.e. that require a Microsoft-signed first stage boot
> loader.
> 
> There seemed to be a consensus that we could use an implementation
> quite similar to Ubuntu's.  Some may be concerned that use of a
> Microsoft signing key results in a non-free binary, but so long as the
> target machines (amd64 architecture) generally allow installation of
> alternate public keys this is not so different from the way that APT
> on a Debian system requires Debian-signed Release files by default.
> 
> So the plan seems to be:
> 
> 1. Colin Watson will prepare dak changes to support upload and
> subsequent signing of EFI executables.  (This is an embedded, not
> detached, signature.)
> 
> 2. Steve Langasek will prepare and upload a package of the 'shim' EFI
> boot loader.  This will embed our own set of public keys
> (corresponding to those used by dak) and can load any other EFI
> executable signed by one of them.  Later, there will be a shim-signed
> package containing the same executable with a Microsoft signature.
> (This costs money and takes several days, but shim should require only
> very infrequent changes.)
> 
> 3. Colin Watson will update the GRUB package to build a to-be-signed
> monolithic EFI executable separate from the package.  Then he will add
> a grub-signed package that includes the Debian-signed executable from
> the archive.  This executable would be suitable for use on both
> removable media and the installed system.
> 
> 4. The kernel team may also need to upload kernel images for signing
> and add linux-image-signed packages with the Debian-signed kernel
> images.  This is because some quirks in the kernel should be run
> before calling ExitBootServices().

could you please tell us whether anything changed during the past year?
Is there any chance we could think of having SB in jessie, or should we
consider it an unreasonable goal for this release and concentrate on
other things?

Mraw,
KiBi.
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