Re: [RFC V4 PATCH 00/15] Signature verification of hibernatesnapshot

From: joeyli
Date: Thu Sep 26 2013 - 00:40:15 EST


æ åï2013-09-26 æ 02:27 +0200ïPavel Machek æåï
> On Wed 2013-09-25 15:16:54, James Bottomley wrote:
> > On Wed, 2013-09-25 at 17:25 -0400, Alan Stern wrote:
> > > On Wed, 25 Sep 2013, David Howells wrote:
> > >
> > > > I have pushed some keyrings patches that will likely affect this to:
> > > >
> > > > http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/dhowells/linux-fs.git/log/?h=keys-devel
> > > >
> > > > I intend to ask James to pull these into his next branch. If he's happy to do
> > > > so, I can look at pulling at least your asymmetric keys patch on top of them.
> > >
> > > This suggests a point that I raised at the Linux Plumbers conference:
> > >
> > > Why are asymmetric keys used for verifying the hibernation image? It
> > > seems that a symmetric key would work just as well. And it would be a
> > > lot quicker to generate, because it wouldn't need any high-precision
> > > integer computations.
> >
> > The reason is the desire to validate that the previous kernel created
> > something which it passed on to the current kernel (in this case, the
> > hibernation image) untampered with. To do that, something must be
> > passed to the prior kernel that can be validated but *not* recreated by
> > the current kernel.
>
> I don't get this. Why is it important that current kernel can't
> recreate the signature?
>
> Current kernel is not considered malicious (if it were, you have worse
> problems).
>

Current boot kernel should not malicious especially when UEFI secure
boot enabled.

> Pavel
>
> PS: And yes, it would be nice to have
> Documentation/power/swsusp-uefi.txt (or something) explaining the
> design.
>

Thanks for your suggestion, I will write the swsusp-uefi.txt to
explaining the design in next version.


Thanks a lot!
Joey Lee

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