From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from blyat.fensystems.co.uk (blyat.fensystems.co.uk [54.246.183.96]) by mx.groups.io with SMTP id smtpd.web08.5772.1617875735879595242 for ; Thu, 08 Apr 2021 02:55:36 -0700 Authentication-Results: mx.groups.io; dkim=missing; spf=pass (domain: ipxe.org, ip: 54.246.183.96, mailfrom: mcb30@ipxe.org) Received: from dolphin.home (unknown [IPv6:2a00:23c6:5495:5e00:72b3:d5ff:feb1:e101]) by blyat.fensystems.co.uk (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id E1C4E44289; Thu, 8 Apr 2021 09:55:31 +0000 (UTC) Subject: Re: [edk2-devel] [GSoC proposal] Secure Image Loader To: =?UTF-8?Q?Marvin_H=c3=a4user?= , devel@edk2.groups.io, Laszlo Ersek , Andrew Fish , Michael Kinney References: <471e56d3-934f-6bb3-52d7-4892f6a75509@ipxe.org> <3bfbdd8d-9417-77f4-6444-5841e685548f@posteo.de> From: "Michael Brown" Message-ID: Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2021 10:55:31 +0100 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/78.7.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-2.9 required=5.0 tests=ALL_TRUSTED,BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.2 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.2 (2018-09-13) on blyat.fensystems.co.uk Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Language: en-US Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On 08/04/2021 10:41, Marvin H=C3=A4user wrote: > No,=20 > backwards-compatibility will not be broken in the sense that the old AP= I=20 > is absent or malfunctioning. Perfect. :) > As I *have* said, I imagine there to be an=20 > option (default true) to expose both variants. Very much less perfect. The mere existence of such an option=20 immediately reimposes the burden on external code to support both,=20 because it opens up the possibility of running on systems where the=20 option is set to false. > With default settings, I=20 > want the loader to be at the very least mostly plug-'n'-play with=20 > existing platform drivers and OS loaders from the real world. "Mostly"=20 > can be clarified further once we have a detailed plan on the changes=20 > (and responses to e.g. malformed binary issues with iPXE and GNU-EFI). Yes; thank you for https://github.com/ipxe/ipxe/pull/313. It will take=20 some time to review. As a practical consideration: unless there is a security reason to do=20 otherwise, you should almost certainly relax the constraints on images=20 that your loader will accept, to avoid causing unnecessary end-user=20 disruption. What is the *security* reason behind your alignment=20 requirements (which clearly are not required by any other toolchain,=20 including those used for signing Secure Boot binaries)? Thanks, Michael