Linux with secure boot

Secure Boot on Arch Linux

Secure boot is a part of the relatively new Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (uefi) specification that allows verifying the legitimacy of early boot code using a public key infrastructure. It has been widely criticised due to the fact that it could prevent non-Microsoft-blessed software from booting if a user cannot change the keys or disable the feature.

I am going to ignore the political issues, and focus on how to use secure boot to protect the boot process of an Arch Linux system running on a Thinkpad x240. These instructions will likely work on other hardware with other distributions, but there will be subtle differences that you have to find (and I take no responsibility if you don’t and this happens).

This will require a few steps:

1. First, get your computer booting with UEFI. I used systemd-boot (formerly Gummiboot) as a loader, but you can directly boot a signed Linux kernel if you wish (I am also ignoring the political discussion around systemd for now)
2. Then, create the necessary keys, and install them into the firmware
3. Combine your kernel, initramfs, and kernel boot options into one file
4. Sign the bootloader and kernel(s), and enable secure boot 🙂
5. Automate everything

UEFI

I’m going to gloss over this a bit, since it’s not my main topic today. The Arch Linux wiki has some good information to start.

Before starting, you should probably be using GPT. This might work with MBR, but I can’t promise anything.

First, you will need to install systemd-boot as your default boot loader: bootctl install . I have my ESP mounted at /boot, so if you have it mounted elsewhere (say, /boot/efi ), you will need to do bootctl —path=/boot/efi/ install .

The configuration format for systemd-boot is described here. Generally, you will want:

default arch timeout 4 editor 0 

title Arch Linux linux /vmlinuz-linux initrd /initramfs-linux.img options root=PARTUUID=14420948-2cea-4de7-b042-40f67c618660 rw 

Adjust the paths as needed (ie, you might need /boot/efi/loader/loader.conf and /boot/efi/loader/entries/arch.conf ). You will need the kernel and initramfs to be in the root of your esp, however, so you can either just mount your ESP at /boot, or you will need to set up some sort of script to copy the kernel and initramfs after install (look into systemd .path files).

Keys

I’m going to skip the theory, and move right to the process. If you are interested in how secure boot works, start here and especially look here.

Generate the keys

I recommend doing this in a secure location on your main filesystem, such as /root/keys .

At this point, you will need to install sbsigntools and efitools from the AUR.

Use this script to generate the keys: mkkeys.sh :

#!/bin/bash echo -n "Enter a Common Name to embed in the keys: " read NAME openssl req -new -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -subj "/CN=$NAME PK/" -keyout PK.key \ -out PK.crt -days 3650 -nodes -sha256 openssl req -new -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -subj "/CN=$NAME KEK/" -keyout KEK.key \ -out KEK.crt -days 3650 -nodes -sha256 openssl req -new -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -subj "/CN=$NAME DB/" -keyout DB.key \ -out DB.crt -days 3650 -nodes -sha256 openssl x509 -in PK.crt -out PK.cer -outform DER openssl x509 -in KEK.crt -out KEK.cer -outform DER openssl x509 -in DB.crt -out DB.cer -outform DER GUID=`python2 -c 'import uuid; print str(uuid.uuid1())'` echo $GUID > myGUID.txt cert-to-efi-sig-list -g $GUID PK.crt PK.esl cert-to-efi-sig-list -g $GUID KEK.crt KEK.esl cert-to-efi-sig-list -g $GUID DB.crt DB.esl rm -f noPK.esl touch noPK.esl sign-efi-sig-list -t "$(date --date='1 second' +'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')" \ -k PK.key -c PK.crt PK PK.esl PK.auth sign-efi-sig-list -t "$(date --date='1 second' +'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')" \ -k PK.key -c PK.crt PK noPK.esl noPK.auth chmod 0600 *.key echo "" echo "" echo "For use with KeyTool, copy the *.auth and *.esl files to a FAT USB" echo "flash drive or to your EFI System Partition (ESP)." echo "For use with most UEFIs' built-in key managers, copy the *.cer files." echo "" 

Copy the .cer , .esl , and .auth files to a FAT32 filesystem that will be accessible to the bootloader (I justed used my ESP, aka /boot ).

Install the keys

Next, you will need to put your motherboard into secure boot setup mode. To do this on a Thinkpad x240, boot into setup (press F1 at the splash screen), toggle over to “Security” (right arrow key), toggle down to “Secure Boot” (down arrow key), select it (enter), go down to “Reset to Setup Mode”, and hit enter. Now, hit escape to go back, scroll over to “Reboot”, select “Exit Saving Changes”, and hit “Yes”.

You are now ready to use KeyTool to install the keys. Copy /usr/share/efitools/efi/KeyTool.efi to your ESP (ie, into /boot ), and boot from it. The easiest way to do this is create the following loader entry:

title KeyTool efi /KeyTool.efi 

Now you can boot into the KeyTool entry, and you’re ready to replace the keys!

On the KeyTool main menu, you have the option to save the existing keys. I didn’t do this, but it’s probably a good idea to do.

After you do or don’t do that, select “Edit Keys” and hit enter, which will bring you to the edit keys page.

Next, delete the db and KEK keys. Start by selecting the “db” entry, selecting the first key, and hitting “delete”. Repeat this for each db and KEK key.

You can also do this for dbx keys (which act as a blacklist), but that’s not as important. If you have any Mok keys, you should probably also delete those.

Now, you need to add your keys, in the order db, KEK, and then PK.

To add a db key, select the db entry, hit “Add New Key”, select the device with your cer , esl , and auth files, navigate to the files, and select the DB.esl file. Repeat this for the KEK with KEK.esl .

Finally, add your platform key. Select “The Platform Key (PK)”, select “Replace Key(s)”, navigate to PK.auth , and select it. You can now exit the KeyTool menus.

Combine the kernel, initramfs, and boot options

This part took me the longest to figure out. For secure boot to be effective, we will need to combine the kernel, initramfs, and boot options into a single file, sign that file, and then use it to boot.

If we didn’t do this, and only signed the kernel, an attacker could modify the initramfs or kernel command line options, making secure boot useless.

To do this, we need the initramfs to be an uncompressed cpio archive. You can just gunzip an initramfs file in /boot , but I would recommend editing /etc/mkinitcpio.conf so that COMPRESSION=”cat” is present at the end (and other COMPRESSION= options are commented out). This is to help automate everything later.

Now, take your kernel ( /boot/vmlinuz-linux ), your initramfs ( /boot/initramfs-linux.img ), and a text file containing your boot command line ( cat /proc/cmdline > cmdline.txt ), and put them in one folder (eg /tmp/boot ).

You will use objcopy to put these files into one image:

objcopy \ --add-section .osrel=/etc/os-release --change-section-vma .osrel=0x20000 \ --add-section .cmdline="cmdline.txt" --change-section-vma .cmdline=0x30000 \ --add-section .linux="vmlinuz-linux" --change-section-vma .linux=0x40000 \ --add-section .initrd="initramfs-linux.img" --change-section-vma .initrd=0x3000000 \ /usr/lib/systemd/boot/efi/linuxx64.efi.stub kernel.efi 

You will now have a kernel.efi file! This will boot as an efi application.

You can test this by copying it to /boot (or your ESP), and adding the following loader entry:

title Linux EFI Test efi /kernel.efi 

If it works, great! We’re ready to sign it and enable secure boot!

Signing things

Signing an efi application is really easy, you just need the DB.key and DB.crt files created earlier.

cd /boot sbsign --key /root/keys/DB.key --cert /root/keys/DB.crt --output kernel.efi kernel.efi 

That’s it. It signs kernel.efi and outputs the signed file to kernel.efi .

You will also need to sign the systemd-boot bootloader, with

cd /boot/EFI/systemd/ sudo sbsign --key /root/keys/DB.key --cert /root/keys/DB.crt --output systemd-bootx64.efi systemd-bootx64.efi 

Note that systemd-boot will check the signatures on any efi application it tries to load and run, so you will need to sign systemd-bootx64.efi and every kernel you try to boot.

You’re now ready to enable secure boot and test it.

Enable secure boot

Boot into setup (F1 on the splash screen), go over to “Security”, down to “Secure Boot”, select it, select “Secure Boot”, scroll to “[Enabled]”, and hit enter. This may prompt you to automatically update some other settings, such as disabling legacy mode boot. Then, hit escape to go back, scroll right to “Reboot”, select “Exit Saving Changes”, and hit “Yes”.

Secure boot is now enabled, and you’ll get a nasty error if you try to boot an non-signed kernel or bootloader. Note that this includes things like live CDs, so you’ll need to either sign those or turn off secure boot to boot those. (Note: in theory, you could install Canonical’s db key, which would allow you to boot recent Ubuntu releases, or Microsoft’s db key, which would allow you to boot anything signed with that. Doing so is left as an exercise to the reader.)

Automate it

(Note: from here on out, this is very Arch Linux specific. But have fun if you want to try with another distro!)

This is all fine and good, except when you need to update your kernel. If you forget to combine everything and sign it after the upgrade, you’ll be stuck with an old version of the kernel booting from kernel.efi . To fix this, I wrote a script and a pacman hook to automatically rebuild and re-sign kernel updates.

The script supports multiple kernels. It doesn’t create loader entries, so you will need to do that yourself.

I placed this script in /root/secure-boot , but feel free to change that (just be careful going forward).

#!/bin/bash FILE=$(echo $1 | sed 's/boot\///') BOOTDIR=/boot CERTDIR=/root/keys KERNEL=$1 INITRAMFS="/boot/intel-ucode.img /boot/initramfs-$(echo $FILE | sed 's/vmlinuz-//').img" EFISTUB=/usr/lib/systemd/boot/efi/linuxx64.efi.stub BUILDDIR=_build OUTIMG=/boot/$(echo $FILE | sed 's/vmlinuz-//').img CMDLINE=/etc/cmdline mkdir -p $BUILDDIR cat $ > $/initramfs.img /usr/bin/objcopy \ --add-section .osrel=/etc/os-release --change-section-vma .osrel=0x20000 \ --add-section .cmdline=$ --change-section-vma .cmdline=0x30000 \ --add-section .linux=$ --change-section-vma .linux=0x40000 \ --add-section .initrd=$/initramfs.img --change-section-vma .initrd=0x3000000 \ $ $/combined-boot.efi /usr/bin/sbsign --key $/DB.key --cert $/DB.crt --output $/combined-boot-signed.efi $/combined-boot.efi cp $/combined-boot-signed.efi $

This also adds the intel-ucode.img image, for Intel microcode updates. You may want to change the INITRAMFS= line if you don’t have a /boot/intel-ucode.img file.

You will need to create the file /etc/cmdline , which contains your command line options. For reference, mine looks like this:

root=/dev/mapper/root md=0,/dev/sda2,/dev/sdb2 cryptdevice=/dev/md0:root:allow-discards rw i915.semaphores=1 pcie_aspm=force i915.i915_enable_rc6=7 i915.i915_enable_fbc=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1 quiet 

To run this script, change to / , and then run it as root with boot/vmlinuz-linux as the first (and only) parameter:

cd / /root/secure-boot/make-sign-image.sh boot/vmlinuz-linux 

It feels like you’re jumping through hoops to run it manually, but it’s necessary to make it work with pacman.

And finally, create /etc/pacman.d/hooks/ if it doesn’t already exist, and create the following hook:

[Trigger] Operation = Install Operation = Upgrade Type = File Target = boot/vmlinuz-* [Action] When = PostTransaction Exec = /bin/sh -c 'while read -r f; do /root/secure-boot/make-sign-image.sh "$f"; done' NeedsTargets 

TL;DR: when a package updates a file matching boot/vmlinuz-* , run the make-sign-image.sh script with that file name as the parameter (the while read stuff is in case you install or upgrade multiple kernels at once).

(Hooks are described here or in man 5 alpm-hooks )

For each kernel that you install or upgrade, you will now get a /boot/linux-something.img file!

You can test this by reinstalling linux: pacman -S linux . It should automagically create a file named /boot/linux.img .

You can add this to your bootloader by creating the following loader conf file:

Rinse and repeat for any kernel you install (I currently have grsec.conf , linux.conf , lts.conf , and mainline.conf , which should be pretty self explanatory).

That is the end, there is no more

I might write more in the future about other secure boot considerations (ie, detecting if it’s enabled), but for now that’s it. Have fun with your new sense of security in your boot process!

As always, if you have questions feel free to email me at matthew@bentley.link.

Matthew Bentley

I am a student at Case Western Reserve University. I do ops/sre stuff for work and computer stuff for fun.

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