Re: [Etherboot-developers] Prism II (wireless) drivers

[<ebi...@ln...>]

Michael Brown <mb...@fe...> writes:

> On 9 Apr 2002, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> > There is some work in progress to place an MD5 signature on bootable
> > images.  With the spoofabilty of network links somehow that sounds
> > like a desire feature.
> > Thoughts?
> 
> How would the workstation learn what the correct MD5 signature should be?
> Could be sent by the DHCP server but that wouldn't help if the attacker
> had his own DHCP server.

O.k. The base idea is like a checksum.  You have the bytes
to compute it over and the checksum so you can verify the two.

Beyond that I believe the MD5 hash was encrypted, in which case the node
would have an encryption key it would use to decrypt the hash before
verification.  Possibly doing the whole public/private key pair thing.
I am only roughly familiar with the idea.

The people doing this are part of a small university project on trusted,
booting.  If this looks interesting/useful I'll try to drag them into
the discussion.

Eric