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May want to mention protection for initramfs hijacking #5

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noahbliss opened this issue Sep 24, 2020 · 1 comment
Open

May want to mention protection for initramfs hijacking #5

noahbliss opened this issue Sep 24, 2020 · 1 comment
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@noahbliss
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noahbliss commented Sep 24, 2020

Regarding Linux, the secureboot document appears to cover the steps for enabling secureboot and also explains the general architecture for protections enabled with that technology, but there is a commonly overlooked abuse which was not mentioned.
This abuse works against Redhat/Debian/other major distros' default implementations of secureboot and requires deliberate effort to mitigate.

Ultimately this stems from the limitation of secureboot being only able to verify the signature of a single EFI file on disk, but most distributions boot with 2 or 3. Mutilation of these unverified files can result in early-boot privileged code execution, potential disk key interception, and modification of kernel boot parameters which can severely cripple a machine's security posture.

I've worked on some documentation and a tool for remediating this kind of attack here:
https://github.com/noahbliss/mortar

There are some other fantastic additional reading resources as well, but definitely a major design consideration when building a hardened Linux machine.

Additional resources:
https://github.com/Snawoot/linux-secureboot-kit
https://threat.tevora.com/secure-boot-tpm-2/

@bracketttc
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Other resources:
https://safeboot.dev
https://linuxboot.org

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