Herbert Xu <herbert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Personally I don't think the argument above holds water. With > IPsec we had a similar issue of authenticating untrusted peers > using public key cryptography. In that case we successfully > delegated the task to user-space and it is still how it works > to this day. It transpires that we do actually need at least a PGP parser in the kernel - and it needs to be used prior to loading any modules: some Lenovo Thinkpads, at least, may have EFI variables holding a list of keys in PGP form, not X.509 form. For example, in dmesg, you might see: May 16 04:01:01 localhost kernel: integrity: Loading X.509 certificate: UEFI:MokListRT (MOKvar table) May 16 04:01:01 localhost kernel: integrity: Problem loading X.509 certificate -126 On my laptop, if I dump this variable: efivar -e /tmp/q --name=605dab50-e046-4300-abb6-3dd810dd8b23-MokListRT And then looking at the data exported: file /tmp/q I see: /tmp/q: PGP Secret Sub-key - The kernel doesn't currently have a PGP parser. I've checked and the value doesn't parse as ASN.1: openssl asn1parse -in /tmp/q -inform DER 0:d=0 hl=2 l= 21 prim: cont [ 23 ] Error in encoding 001EBA93B67F0000:error:0680007B:asn1 encoding routines:ASN1_get_object:header too long:crypto/asn1/asn1_lib.c:105: which would suggest that it isn't X.509. David