In the PC ecosystem, UEFI Secure Boot is typically configured to trust 2 authorities for signing UEFI boot code, the Microsoft UEFI Certificate Authority (CA) and Windows CA. When malicious or security compromised code is detected, 2 revocation mechanisms are provided by compatible UEFI implementations: signing certificate or image hash. The UEFI Specification does not provides any well tested additional revocation mechanisms.
Signing certificate revocation is not practical for the Windows and Microsoft UEFI CAs because it would revoke too many UEFI applications and drivers, especially for Option ROMs. This is true even for the UEFI CA leaf certificates as they generally sign 1 entire year of UEFI images. For this reason UEFI revocations have, until recently, been performed via image hash.
The UEFI shim bootloader provides a level of digital signature indirection,
enabling more authorities to participate in UEFI Secure Boot. Shims'
certificates typically sign targeted UEFI applications, enabling
certificate-based revocation where it makes sense. As part of the recent
"BootHole" security incident
CVE-2020-10713, 3
certificates and 150 image hashes were added to the UEFI Secure Boot revocation
database dbx on the popular x64 architecture. This single revocation event
consumes 10kB of the 32kB, or roughly one third, of revocation storage
typically available on UEFI platforms. Due to the way that UEFI merges
revocation lists, this plus prior revocation events can result in a dbx that
is almost 15kB in size, approaching 50% capacity.
The large size of the BootHole revocation event is due to the inefficiency of revocation by image hash when there is a security vulnerability in a popular component signed by many authorities, sometimes with many versions.
Coordinating the BootHole revocation has required numerous person months of planning, implementation, and testing multiplied by the number of authorities, deployments, & devices. It is not yet complete, and we anticipate many months of upgrades and testing with a long tail that may last years.
Additionally, when bugs or features require updates to UEFI shim, the number of images signed are multiplied by the number of authorities.
Given the tremendous cost and disruption of a revocation event like BootHole, and increased activity by security researchers in the UEFI Secure Boot space, we should take action to greatly improve this process. Updating revocation capabilities in the UEFI specification and system firmware implementations will take years to deploy into the ecosystem. As such, the focus of this document is on improvements that can be made to the UEFI shim, which are compatible with existing UEFI implementations. Shim can move faster than the UEFI system firmware ecosystem while providing large impact to the in-market UEFI Secure Boot ecosystem.
The background section identified 2 opportunities for improvement:
-
Improving the efficiency of revocation when a number of versions have a vulnerability
- For example, a vulnerability spans some number of versions, it might be more efficient to be able to revoke by version, and simply modify the revocation entry to modify the version each time a vulnerability is detected.
-
Improving the efficiency of revocation when there are many shim variations
- For example, a new shim is released to address bugs or adding features. In the current model, the number of images signed are multiplied by the number of authorities as they sign shims to gain the fixes and features.
Microsoft has brainstormed with partners possible solutions for evaluation and feedback:
-
To improve revocation when there are many versions of vulnerable boot images, shim, GRUB, or otherwise, investigate methods of revoking by image metadata that includes generation numbers. Once targeting data is established (e.g. Company foo, product bar, boot component zed), each revocation event ideally edits an existing entry, increasing the trusted minimum security generation.
-
To improve revocation when there is a shim vulnerability, and there are many shim images, standardize on a single image shared by authorities. Each release of bug fixes and features result in 1 shim being signed, compressing the number by dozens. This has the stellar additional benefit of reducing the number of shim reviews, which should result in much rejoicing. The certificates used by a vendor to sign individual boot components would be picked up from additional PE files that are signed either by a shim-specific key controlled by Microsoft, or controlled by a vendor, but used only to sign additional key files. This key built into shim is functionally similar to a CA certificate. The certificates built into shim can be revoked by placing the image hash into dbx, similar to the many shim solution we have today.
This document focuses on the shim bootloader, not the UEFI specification or updates to UEFI firmware.
Microsoft may refer to this as a form of UEFI Secure Boot Advanced Targeting (SBAT), perhaps to be named EFI_CERT_SBAT. This introduces a mechanism to require a specific level of resistance to UEFI Secure Boot bypasses.
Metadata that includes the vendor, product family, product, component, version and generation are added to artifacts. This metadata is protected by the digital signature. New image authorization data structures, akin to the EFI_CERT_foo EFI_SIGNATURE_DATA structure (see Signature Database in UEFI specification), describe how this metadata can be incorporated into allow or deny lists. In a simple implementation, 1 SBAT entry with security generations could be used for each revocable boot module, replacing many image hashes with 1 entry with security generations. To minimize the size of EFI_CERT_SBAT, the signature owner field might be omitted, and recommend that either metadata use shortened names, or perhaps the EFI_CERT_SBAT contains a hash of the non-generation metadata instead of the metadata itself.
Ideally, servicing of the image authorization databases would be updated to support replacement of individual EFI_SIGNATURE_DATA items. However, if we assume that new UEFI variable(s) are used, to be serviced by 1 entity per variable (no sharing), then the existing, in-market SetVariable(), without the APPEND attribute, could be used. Microsoft currently issues dbx updates exclusively with the APPEND attribute under the assumption that multiple entities might be servicing dbx. When a new revocation event takes place, rather than increasing the size of variables with image hashes, existing variables can simply be updated with new security generations, consuming no additional space. This constrains the number of entries to the number of unique boot components revoked, independent of generations revoked. The solution may support several major/minor versions, limiting revocation to build/security generations, perhaps via wildcards.
While previously the APPEND attribute guaranteed that it would not be possible to downgrade the set of revocations on a system using a previously signed variable update, this guarantee can also be accomplished by setting the EFI_VARIABLE_TIME_BASED_AUTHENTICATED_WRITE_ACCESS attribute. This will verify that the timestamp value of the signed data is later than the current timestamp value associated with the data currently stored in that variable.
Products (not vendors, a vendor can have multiple products or even pass a product from one vendor to another over time) are assigned a name. Product names can specify a specific version or refer to the entire product family. For example mydistro and mydistro,12.
Components that are used as a link in the UEFI Secure Boot chain of trust are assigned names. Examples of components are shim, GRUB, kernel, hypervisors, etc.
Below is an example of a product and component, both in the same sbat.csv file. sbat
defines the version of the format of the revocation metadata itself.
grub.acme is an example of a product name.
sbat,1,SBAT Version,sbat,1,https://github.com/rhboot/shim/blob/main/SBAT.md
grub.acme,1,Acme Corporation,grub,1.96-8191,https://acme.arpa/packages/grub
We could conceivably support sub-components, but it's hard to conceive of a scenario that would trigger a UEFI variable update that wouldn't justify a hypervisor or kernel re-release to enforce that sub-component level from there. Something like a "level 1.5 hypervisor" that can exist between different kernel generations can be considered its own component.
Each component is assigned a minimum global generation number. Vendors signing component binary artifacts with a specific global generation number are required to include fixes for any public or pre-disclosed issue required for that generation. Additionally, in the event that a bypass only manifests in a specific product's component, vendors may ask for a product-specific generation number to be published for one of their product's components. This avoids triggering an industry wide re-publishing of otherwise safe components.
In the example above, 1 in sbat,1 is sbat's minimum global generation number.
A product-specific minimum generation number only applies to the instance of that component that is signed with that product name. Another product's instance of the same component may be installed on the same system and would not be subject to the other product's product-specific minimum generation number. However, both of those components will need to meet the global minimum generation number for that component. A very likely scenario would be that a product is shipped with an incomplete fix required for a specific minimum generation number, but is labeled with that number. Rather than having the entire industry that uses that component re-release, just that product's minimum generation number would be incremented and that product's component re-released along with a UEFI variable update specifying that requirement.
In the example above, 1 in grub.acme,1 is grub.acme's product-specific minimum
generation number.
The global and product-specific generation number name spaces are not tied to each other. The global number is managed externally, and the vast majority of products will never publish a minimum product-specific generation number for any of their components. Unspecified, more specific generation numbers are treated as 0.
A minimum feature set, for example enforced kernel lock down, may be required as well to sign and label a component with a specific generation number. As time goes on, it is likely that the minimum feature set required for the currently valid generation number will expand. (For example, hypervisors supporting UEFI Secure Boot guests may at some point require memory encryption or similar protection mechanism.)
The footprint of the UEFI variable payload will expand as product-specific generation numbers ahead of the global number are added. However, it will shrink again as the global number for that component is incremented again. The expectation is that a product-specific or vendor-specific generation number is a rare event, and that the generation number for the upstream code base will suffice in most cases.
A product-specific generation number is needed if a CVE is fixed in code that only exists in a specific product's branch. This would either be something like product-specific patches, or a mis-merge that only occurred in that product. Setting a product-specific generation number for such an event eliminates the need for other vendors to have to re-release the binaries for their products with an incremented global number.
Both generation numbers should only ever go up; they should never be reset.
Let's imagine a fictional company named "Vendor C" having an active fork of the
upstream GNU GRUB2. Therefore, Vendor C provides their own product-specific
generation number. This is happening at the point in time, when the upstream
product's entry starts with grub,3, hence why Vendor C's product ships with
entries similar to:
sbat,1,SBAT Version,sbat,1,https://github.com/rhboot/shim/blob/main/SBAT.md
grub,3,Free Software Foundation,[...]
grub.vendorc,1,Vendor C,[...]
Suddenly there is a global CVE disclosure and all vendors coordinate to release fixed components on the disclosure date. This release bumps the global generation number for GRUB from 3 to 4. Vendor C's product's binaries are now shipped with the entries:
sbat,1,SBAT Version,sbat,1,https://github.com/rhboot/shim/blob/main/SBAT.md
grub,4,Free Software Foundation,[...]
grub.vendorc,1,Vendor C,[...]
After this, the UEFI SBAT revocation variable (named SbatLevel) would be updated to raise the mandatory minimal global generation number for GRUB to 4.
However, Vendor C mis-merges the patches into one of their products and does not become aware of the fact that this mis-merge created an additional vulnerability until after they have published a signed binary in that vulnerable state. Vendor C's GRUB binary can now be abused to compromise their systems.
To remedy this, Vendor C will release a security-fixed binary with the same global generation number and an updated product-specific generation number (set to 2):
sbat,1,SBAT Version,sbat,1,https://github.com/rhboot/shim/blob/main/SBAT.md
grub,4,Free Software Foundation,[...]
grub.vendorc,2,Vendor C,[...]
Again, in the perfect scenario, to provide the perfect security, the UEFI SBAT revocation variable would then be set, so that GRUB with a global generation number of only 4 or higher would be able to be booted, as well as Vendor C's products with their number of only 2 or higher. See for yourself, how this looks like, in the SbatLevel_Variable.txt file.
If and when there is another upstream fix for a CVE that would bump the GRUB
global number to 5, this product-specific number can be dropped from the UEFI
SbatLevel variable (because the binaries starting with upstream's grub,4
entry would get denylisted anyway), but with the current consensus it's
important to keep the product-specific number shipped with the product's binary,
like in the case of Vendor C:
sbat,1,SBAT Version,sbat,1,https://github.com/rhboot/shim/blob/main/SBAT.md
grub,5,Free Software Foundation,[...]
grub.vendorc,2,Vendor C,[...]
The goal is generally to limit end user impact with as few re-releases as possible, while not creating an unnecessarily large UEFI revocation variable payload.
| prior to GRUB first disclosure* |
after GRUB first disclosure* |
after Vendor C's first update |
after Vendor C's second update |
after GRUB second disclosure* |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GRUB global generation number in artifacts .sbat section |
3 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 5 |
| Vendor C's product generation number in artifact's .sbat section |
1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 3 |
| GRUB global generation number in UEFI SbatLevel variable |
3 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 5 |
| Vendor C's product generation number in UEFI SbatLevel variable |
not set | not set | 2 | 3 | not set |
* A disclosure is the event/date where a CVE and fixes for it are made public.
The product-specific generation number does not reset and continues to increase over the course of these non-global events. Continuity of more specific generation numbers must be maintained in this way in order to satisfy checks against older revocation data.
The UEFI SbatLevel variable payload will be stored publicly in the shim source base and identify the global generation associated with a product or version-specific one. The payload is also built into shim to additionally limit exposure.
Products that have reached the end of their support life by definition no longer receive patches. They are also generally not examined for CVEs. Allowing such unsupported products to continue to participate in UEFI Secure Boot is at the very least questionable. If an EoSL product is made up of commonly used components, such as the GRUB and the Linux kernel, it is reasonable to assume that the global generation numbers will eventually move forward and exclude those products from booting on a UEFI Secure Boot enabled system. However a product made up of GRUB and a closed source kernel is just as conceivable. In that case the kernel version may never move forward once the product reaches its end of support. Therefore it is recommended that the product-specific generation number be incremented past the latest one shown in any binary for that product, effectively disabling that product on UEFI Secure Boot enabled systems.
A subset of this case would be a beta-release that may contain eventually abandoned, experimental, kernel code. Such releases should have their product-specific generation numbers incremented past the latest one shown in any released, or unreleased, binary signed with a production key.
Until a release is retired in this manner, vendors are responsible for keeping up with fixes for CVEs and ensuring that any known signed binaries containing known CVEs are denied from booting on UEFI Secure Boot enabled systems via the most up to date UEFI metadata.
Even prior to or without moving to one-shim, it is desirable to get every
vendor onto as few shims as possible. Ideally a vendor would have a single shim
signed with their certificate embedded and then use that certificate to sign
additional <Vendor>_key.EFI key files that then contain all the keys that the
individual components for their products are signed with. This file name needs
to be registered at the time of shim review and should not be changed without
going back to a shim review. A vendor should be able to store as many
certificated (or a CA certificate) as they need for all the components of all
of their products. Older versions of this file can be revoked via SBAT. In
order to limit the footprint of the SBAT revocation metadata, it is vital that
vendors do not create additional key files beyond what they have been approved
for at shim review.
Since Vendor Product keys are brought into Shim as signed binaries, generation numbering can and should be used to revoke them in case of a private key compromise.
The initial SBAT implementation will add SBAT metadata to Shim and GRUB and enforce SBAT on all components labeled with it. Until a component (e.g. the Linux kernel) gains SBAT metadata it can not be revoked via SBAT, but only by revoking the keys signing that component. These keys will live in separate, product-specific signed PE files that contain only the certificate and SBAT metadata for the key files. These key files can then be revoked via SBAT in order to invalidate and replace a specific key. While certificates built into Shim can be revoked via SBAT and Shim introspection, this practice would still result in a proliferation of Shim binaries that would need to be revoked via dbx in the event of an early Shim code bug. Therefore, SBAT must be used in conjunction with separate Vendor Product Key binaries.
At the time of this writing, revoking a Linux kernel with a lockdown compromise is not spelled out as a requirement for shim signing. In fact, with limited dbx space and the size of the attack surface for lockdown it would be impractical do so without SBAT. With SBAT it should be possible to raise the bar, and treat lockdown bugs that would allow a kexec of a tampered kernel as revocations.
It is expected that kexec and other similar implementations of kernels spawning other kernels will eventually consume and honor SBAT metadata. Until they do, the same Vendor Product Key binary based revocation will need to be used for them.
Adding a .sbat section containing the SBAT metadata structure to PE images.
| field | meaning |
|---|---|
| component_name | the name we're comparing |
| component_generation | the generation number for the comparison |
| vendor_name | human readable vendor name |
| vendor_package_name | human readable package name |
| vendor_version | human readable package version (maybe machine parseable too, not specified here) |
| vendor_url | url to look stuff up, contact, whatever. |
The format of this .sbat section is comma separated values, or more specifically ASCII encoded strings.
For grub, a build from a fresh checkout of upstream might have the following in
.sbat:
sbat,1,SBAT Version,sbat,1,https://github.com/rhboot/shim/blob/main/SBAT.md
grub,1,Free Software Foundation,grub,2.04,https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
A Fedora build believed to have exactly the same set of vulnerabilities plus one that was never upstream might have:
sbat,1,SBAT Version,sbat,1,https://github.com/rhboot/shim/blob/main/SBAT.md
grub,1,Free Software Foundation,grub,2.04,https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
grub.fedora,1,The Fedora Project,grub2,2.04-31.fc33,https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/grub2
Likewise, Red Hat has various builds for RHEL 7 and RHEL 8, all of which have
something akin to the following in .sbat:
sbat,1,SBAT Version,sbat,1,https://github.com/rhboot/shim/blob/main/SBAT.md
grub,1,Free Software Foundation,grub,2.02,https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
grub.fedora,1,Red Hat Enterprise Linux,grub2,2.02-0.34.fc24,mail:[email protected]
grub.rhel,1,Red Hat Enterprise Linux,grub2,2.02-0.34.el7_2,mail:[email protected]
The Debian package believed to have the same set of vulnerabilities as upstream might have:
sbat,1,SBAT Version,sbat,1,https://github.com/rhboot/shim/blob/main/SBAT.md
grub,1,Free Software Foundation,grub,2.04,https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
grub.debian,1,Debian,grub2,2.04-12,https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/grub2
Another party known for less than high quality software who carry a bunch of
out of tree grub patches on top of a very old grub version from before any of
the upstream vulns were committed to the tree. They haven't ever had the
upstream vulns, and in fact have never shipped any vulnerabilities. Their grub
.sbat might have the following (which we'd be very suspect of signing, but
hey, suppose it turns out to be correct):
sbat,1,SBAT Version,sbat,1,https://github.com/rhboot/shim/blob/main/SBAT.md
grub.acme,1,Acme Corporation,grub,1.96-8191,https://acme.arpa/packages/grub
At the same time, we're all shipping the same shim-16 codebase, and in our
shim builds, we all have the following in .sbat:
sbat,1,SBAT Version,sbat,1,https://github.com/rhboot/shim/blob/main/SBAT.md
shim,1,UEFI shim,shim,16,https://github.com/rhboot/shim
Components that do not have special code to construct the final PE files can simply add this section using objcopy(1):
objcopy --set-section-alignment '.sbat=512' --add-section .sbat=sbat.csv foo.efi
Older versions of objcopy(1) do not support --set-section-alignment which is required to force the correct alignment expected from a PE file. As long as there is another step, later in the build process, such as an linker invocation that forces alignment, objcopy(1) does not need to align an intermediate file.
The SBAT UEFI variable contains a descriptive form of all components used by all UEFI signed Operating Systems, along with a minimum generation number for each one. It may also contain a product-specific generation number, which in turn may also specify version-specific generation numbers. It is expected that specific generation numbers will be exceptions that will be obsoleted if and when the global number for a component is incremented.
Initially the SBAT UEFI variable will set generation numbers for components to 1, but is expected to grow as CVEs are discovered and fixed. The following show the evolution over a sample set of events:
Before CVEs are encountered, an undesirable module was built into Fedora's grub, so it's product-specific generation number has been bumped:
sbat,1
shim,1
grub,1
grub.fedora,2
Another kind security researcher shows up with a serious bug, and this one was in upstream grub-0.94 and every version after that, and is shipped by all vendors.
At this point, each vendor updates their grub builds, and updates the
component_generation in .sbat to 2. The GRUB upstream build now looks like:
sbat,1,SBAT Version,sbat,1,https://github.com/rhboot/shim/blob/main/SBAT.md
grub,2,Free Software Foundation,grub,2.05,https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
But Fedora's now looks like:
sbat,1,SBAT Version,sbat,1,https://github.com/rhboot/shim/blob/main/SBAT.md
grub,2,Free Software Foundation,grub,2.04,https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
grub.fedora,2,The Fedora Project,grub2,2.04-33.fc33,https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/grub2
Other distros either rebase on 2.05 or theirs change similarly to Fedora's. We now have two options for Acme Corp:
- add a
grub.acme,2entry toSBAT - have Acme Corp add
grub,2,Free Software Foundation,grub,1.96,https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/to their new build's.sbat
We talk to Acme and they agree to do the latter, thus saving flash real estate to be developed on another day. Their binary now looks like:
sbat,1,SBAT Version,sbat,1,https://github.com/rhboot/shim/blob/main/SBAT.md
grub,2,Free Software Foundation,grub,1.96,https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
grub.acme,1,Acme Corporation,grub,1.96-8192,https://acme.arpa/packages/grub
The UEFI CA issues an update which looks like:
sbat,1
shim,1
grub,2
grub.fedora,2
Which is literally the byte array:
{
's', 'b', 'a', 't', ',', '1', '\n',
's', 'h', 'i', 'm', ',', '1', '\n',
'g', 'r', 'u', 'b', ',', '2', '\n',
'g', 'r', 'u', 'b', '.', 'f', 'e', 'd', 'o', 'r', 'a', ',', '2', '\n',
}
Acme at this point discovers some features have been added to grub and they
want them. They ship a new grub build that's completely rebased on top of
upstream and has no known vulnerabilities. Its .sbat data looks like:
sbat,1,SBAT Version,sbat,1,https://github.com/rhboot/shim/blob/main/SBAT.md
grub,2,Free Software Foundation,grub,2.05,https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
grub.acme,1,Acme Corporation,grub,2.05-1,https://acme.arpa/packages/grub
Debian discovers that they actually shipped bug 0 as well (woops). They
produce a new build which fixes it and has the following in .sbat:
sbat,1,SBAT Version,sbat,1,https://github.com/rhboot/shim/blob/main/SBAT.md
grub,2,Free Software Foundation,grub,2.04,https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
grub.debian,2,Debian,grub2,2.04-13,https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/grub2
Before the UEFI CA has released an update, though, another upstream issue is found. Everybody updates their builds as they did for bug 1. Debian also updates theirs, as they would, and their new build has:
sbat,1,SBAT Version,sbat,1,https://github.com/rhboot/shim/blob/main/SBAT.md
grub,3,Free Software Foundation,grub,2.04,https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
grub.debian,2,Debian,grub2,2.04-13,https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/grub2
And the UEFI CA issues an update to SBAT which has:
sbat,1
shim,1
grub,3
grub.fedora,2
The grub.fedora product-specific line could be dropped since a Fedora GRUB with a global generation number that also contained the bug that prompted the fedora-specific revocation was never published. This results in the following reduced UEFI SBAT revocation update:
sbat,1
shim,1
grub,3
Two key things here:
grub.debianstill got updated to2in their.sbatdata, because a vulnerability was fixed that is only covered by that updated number.- There is still no
SBATupdate forgrub.debian, because there's no binary that needs it which is not covered by updatinggrubto3.