Re: [PATCH v0] Support to disable reed-solomon codes

[Jonathan McCune]

On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 8:13 PM, Andrey Borzenkov <address@hidden> wrote:

В Fri,  1 Nov 2013 17:04:00 -0700
Jon McCune <address@hidden> пишет:

>  * new grub-*-setup flag to disable insertion of reed solomon codes
>  * grub-install support for option --no-rs-codes

What problem does it solve?

A simple motivation is the desire to run the bare minimum amount of code required to boot a machine.

However, the high-level problem I'm trying to address is to make the binary part of GRUB (core.img + boot.img or similar) easier to verify cryptographically.  

First, if a hash or signature checks out, then the bits are known to be correct and there's no need for the redundancy of the RS codes.

Second, I am not a fan of verification mechanisms that require "just install it, then look at what is installed and assume it is correct, and then sign that."  I think it should be possible to generate all the necessary signatures at *build time* instead of *install time* (modulo knowledge of the install target's partition table layout), to eliminate any target-specific configuration weirdness that's not accounted for at build time.

I think it also helps to think about this problem by working backwards.  Build GRUB on machine A, and install it on machine B (assume same architecture everywhere, but it doesn't really matter).  Given the contents of B's disk (e.g., MBR + contents of embedding area), and the build output of A, how do we know if machine B indeed has all the right bits installed?  

It's not too hard to run the same grub-mkimage command everywhere so as to generate a consistent core.img (and whatever .img makes sense for the MBR) doing the verification, and it's not too hard to take knowledge of B's partition table layout to make the necessary changes to those .img files. But, the reed-solomon codes that util/setup.c adds into the embedding area are yet another step that would need to be backed out.    

This patch just adds a flag. :)

Thanks,

-Jon