On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 12:26:56PM -0800, Eric W. Biederman wrote: [..] > Recently there is a desire to figure out how to /sbin/kexec support > signed kernel images. What will probably happen is to have a specially > trusted userspace application perform the verification. Sort of like > dom0 for the linux userspace. A few other ideas have been batted around > but none that have stuck. [ CC David Howells ] Eric, In a private conversation, David Howells suggested why not pass kernel signature in a segment to kernel and kernel can do the verification. /sbin/kexec signature is verified by kernel at exec() time. Then /sbin/kexec just passes one signature segment (after regular segment) for each segment being loaded. The segments which don't have signature, are passed with section size 0. And signature passing behavior can be controlled by one new kexec flag. That way /sbin/kexec does not have to worry about doing any verification by itself. In fact, I am not sure how it can do the verification when crypto libraries it will need are not signed (assuming they are not statically linked in). What do you think about this idea? Thanks Vivek
