I've lately been working on support for Secure Boot in Debian, mostly in the packages maintained by the kernel team.

My instructions for setting up UEFI Secure Boot are based on OVMF running on KVM/QEMU. All 'Designed for Windows' PCs should allow reconfiguration of SB, but it may not be easy to do so. They also assume that the firmware includes an EFI shell.

Updated: Robert Edmonds pointed out that the 'Designed for Windows' requirements changed with Windows 10:

The ability to reconfigure SB is indeed now optional for devices which are designed to always boot with a specific Secure Boot configuration. I also noticed that the requirements say that OEMs should not sign an EFI shell binary. Therefore I've revised the instructions to use efibootmgr instead.

Background

UEFI Secure Boot, when configured and enabled (which it is on most new PCs) requires that whatever it loads is signed with a trusted key. The one common trusted key for PCs is held by Microsoft, and while they will sign other people's code for a nominal fee, they require that it also validates the code it loads, i.e. the kernel or next stage boot loader. The kernel in turn is responsible for validating any code that could compromise its integrity (kernel modules, kexec images).

Currently there are no such signed boot loaders in Debian, though the shim and grub-signed packages included in many other distributions should be usable. However it's possible to load an appropriately configured Linux kernel directly from the UEFI firmware (typically through the shell) which is what I'm doing at the moment.

Packaging signed kernels

Signing keys obviously need to be protected against disclosure; the private keys can't be included in a source package. We also won't install them on buildds separately, and generating signatures at build time would of course be unreproducible. So I've created a new source package, linux-signed, which contains detached signatures prepared offline.

Currently the binary packages built from linux-signed also contain only detached signatures, which are applied as necessary at installation time. The signed kernel image (only on x86 for now) is named /boot/vmlinuz-kversion.efi.signed. However, since packages must not modify files owned by another package and I didn't want to dpkg-divert thousands of modules, the module signatures remain detached. Detached module signatures are a new invention of mine, and require changes in kmod and various other packages to support them. (An alternate might be to put signed modules under a different directory and drop a configuration file in /lib/depmod.d to make them higher priority. But then we end up with two copies of every module installed, which can be a substantial waste of space.)

Preparation

The packages you need to repeat the experiment:

  • linux-image-4.5.0-1-flavour version 4.5.1-1 from unstable (only 686, 686-pae or amd64 flavours have signed kernels; most flavours have signed modules)
  • linux-image-4.5.0-1-flavour-signed version 1~exp3 from experimental
  • initramfs-tools version 0.125 from unstable
  • kmod and libkmod2 unofficial version 22-1.2 from people.debian.org

For Secure Boot, you'll then need to copy the signed kernel and the initrd onto the EFI system partition, normally mounted at /boot/efi.

SB requires a Platform Key (PK) which will already be installed on a real PC. You can replace it but you don't need to. If you're using OVMF, there are no persistent keys so you do need to generate your own: 

openssl req -new -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout pk.key -out pk.crt \
    -outform der -nodes

You'll also need to install the certificate for my kernel image signing key, which is under debian/certs in the linux-signed package. OVMF requires this in DER format: 

openssl x509 -in linux-signed-1~exp3/debian/certs/linux-image-benh@debian.org.cert.pem \
    -out linux.crt -outform der

You'll need to copy the certificate(s) to a FAT-formatted partition such as the EFI system partition, so that the firmware can read it.

Use efibootmgr to add a boot entry for the kernel, for example: 

efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda -L linux-signed -l '\vmlinuz.efi' -u 'initrd=initrd.img root=/dev/sda2 ro quiet'

You should use the same kernel parameters as usual, except that you also need to specify the initrd filename using the initrd= parameter. The EFI stub code at the beginning of the kernel will load the initrd using EFI boot services.

Enabling Secure Boot

  1. Reboot the system and enter UEFI setup
  2. Find the menu entry for Secure Boot customisation (in OVMF, it's under 'Device Manager' for some reason)
  3. In OVMF, enrol the PK from pk.crt
  4. Add linux.crt to the DB (whitelist database)
  5. Ensure that Secure Boot is enabled and in 'User Mode'

Booting the kernel in Secure Boot

If all went well, Linux will boot as normal. You can confirm that Secure Boot was enabled by reading /sys/kernel/security/securelevel, which will contain 1 if it was.

Module signature validation

Module signatures are now always checked and unsigned modules will be given the 'E' taint flag. If Secure Boot is used or you add the kernel parameter module.sig_enforce=1, unsigned modules will be rejected. You can also turn on signature enforcement and turn off various other methods of modifying kernel code (such as kexec) by writing 1 to /sys/kernel/security/securelevel.