On Sun, 9 Dec 2018, Nayna Jain wrote:

On secure boot enabled systems, a verified kernel may need to kexec
additional kernels. For example, it may be used as a bootloader needing
to kexec a target kernel or it may need to kexec a crashdump kernel. In
such cases, it may want to verify the signature of the next kernel
image.

It is further possible that the kernel image is signed with third party
keys which are stored as platform or firmware keys in the 'db' variable.
The kernel, however, can not directly verify these platform keys, and an
administrator may therefore not want to trust them for arbitrary usage.
In order to differentiate platform keys from other keys and provide the
necessary separation of trust, the kernel needs an additional keyring to
store platform keys.

This patch creates the new keyring called ".platform" to isolate keys
provided by platform from keys by kernel. These keys are used to
facilitate signature verification during kexec. Since the scope of this
keyring is only the platform/firmware keys, it cannot be updated from
userspace.

This keyring can be enabled by setting CONFIG_INTEGRITY_PLATFORM_KEYRING.

Signed-off-by: Nayna Jain <nayna@linux.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Mimi Zohar <zohar@linux.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serge@hallyn.com>

Reviewed-by: James Morris <redacted>


-- 
James Morris
[off-list ref]