[RFC v3 PATCH 0/2] Introduce Security Version to EFI Stub

Alan Cox
2017-12-07T14:26:57Z

On Tue, 5 Dec 2017 18:01:46 +0800
Gary Lin <glin@suse.com> wrote:

> The series of patches introduce Security Version to EFI stub.
>
> Security Version is a monotonically increasing number and designed to
> prevent the user from loading an insecure kernel accidentally. The
> bootloader maintains a list of security versions corresponding to
> different distributions. After fixing a critical vulnerability, the
> distribution kernel maintainer bumps the "version", and the bootloader
> updates the list automatically.

This seems a mindbogglingly complicated way to implement something you
could do with a trivial script in the package that updates the list of
iffy kernels and when generating the new grub.conf puts them in a menu
of 'old insecure' kernels.

Why do you even need this in the EFI stub ?

What happens if you want to invalidate an old kernel but not push a new
one ? Today if you've got a package that maintains the list of 'iffy'
kernels you can push a tiny package, under your scheme you've got to push
new kernels which is an un-necessary and high risk OS change.

It just feels like an attempt to solve the problem in completely the
wrong place.

Alan