Thiago Jung Bauermann of IBM has submitted a 6-part patch to the Linux-IMA-devel/Linux-Kernel lists, with some improvements to Linux IMA for OpenPOWER secure/trusted boot. Including comments from parts 1 and 6 of the patch, see the full patch for full details.

Appended signatures support for IMA appraisal

On the OpenPOWER platform, secure boot and trusted boot are being implemented using IMA for taking measurements and verifying signatures. Since the kernel image on Power servers is an ELF binary, kernels are signed using the scripts/sign-file tool and thus use the same signature format as signed kernel modules. This patch series adds support in IMA for verifying those signatures. It adds flexibility to OpenPOWER secure boot, because it can boot kernels with the signature appended to them as well as kernels where the signature is stored in the IMA extended attribute. The first four patches are cleanups and improvements that can be taken independently from the others (and from each other as well). The last two are the ones actually focused on this feature. […] This patch introduces the appended_imasig keyword to the IMA policy syntax to specify that a given hook should expect the file to have the IMA signature appended to it. Here is how it can be used in a rule:

appraise func=KEXEC_KERNEL_CHECK appraise_type=appended_imasig
appraise func=KEXEC_KERNEL_CHECK appraise_type=appended_imasig|imasig

In the second form, IMA will accept either an appended signature or a signature stored in the extended attribute. In that case, it will first check whether there is an appended signature, and if not it will read it from the extended attribute. The format of the appended signature is the same used for signed kernel modules. This means that the file can be signed with the scripts/sign-file tool, with a command line such as this:

$ sign-file sha256 privkey_ima.pem x509_ima.der vmlinux

This code only works for files that are hashed from a memory buffer, not for files that are read from disk at the time of hash calculation. In other words, only hooks that use kernel_read_file can support appended signatures. The change in CONFIG_INTEGRITY_SIGNATURE to select CONFIG_KEYS instead of depending on it is to avoid a dependency recursion in CONFIG_IMA_APPRAISE_APPENDED_SIG, because CONFIG_MODULE_SIG_FORMAT selects CONFIG_KEYS and Kconfig complains that CONFIG_INTEGRITY_SIGNATURE depends on it.

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