Towards Measured Boot Out of the Box
summary
CoreOS adds practical measured boot: UEFI + TPM2 support in the bootloader, PCR-based measurement with log replay verification, and a working demo that seals a TOTP seed in the TPM and displays a QR/6-digit check so a user can verify boots. Code exists and deploys to servers but is not yet upstream; problems remain: lack of vendor known-good firmware values, nonreproducible initramfs builds, no automated reseal on updates, and TXT is incompatible with modern UEFI+TPM2 workflows.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (23)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:28Security of the boot chain is vital
- 1:16UEFI Secure Boot
- 3:04No way to prove verification happened
- 4:05Compromised servers
- 6:12Modified laptops
- 6:41Can't protect against hardware attacks
- 7:16Trusted Platform Module
- 7:50Small chip
- 8:30Platform Configuration Registers
- 14:02Trusted GRUB
- 17:32Traditional approach
- 19:04Unimportant configuration changes alter values
- 19:51Use the logfile
- 21:04Log entry contains description of binary and hash of binary
- 22:04Log entry contains text and hash of text
- 22:40Policy describes regular expressions
- 23:12Coreos builds policy automatically on OS release
- 25:46Use UEFI variables
- 28:21Disk encryption keys
- 30:56No secure boot support
- 31:46Incompatible with runtime UEFI
- 32:21Ship bootloader support Ship known-good measurements Integration with firmware updates Deterministic initramfs generation
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