Re[4]: [Etherboot-developers] RFC: Safe booting concept

[Anselm M. H. <an...@ho...>]

Hello Ken,

Saturday, April 26, 2003, 5:06:33 PM, you wrote:

> Eric already has code in 5.1 that will call the checksum routine on data
> blocks as they are loaded. You only need to use those hooks.

I will have a look.

>>I'm not too sure (yet) how to specify something to be put in an
>>"unused" portion of ROM, but I will have a look at it.
>>Having a (lateron #ifdef'ed) call to safeboot_loadpublickey() would be
>>what you want, right? Perhaps even something like keyboard-interactive
>>as a fallback-method - I think I will initially only need /rom and
>>/keyboard support.

> You should only need to modify the build rules that take a .zimg file to
> a .zrom file. Maybe makerom can be modified to do the job. That way you
> can change the key without having to recompile the source. You may need
> to be able to read the ROM at the mapped address, not sure if this is
> possible on all NICs.

Problem is that SafeBoot also could make sense when etherboot is
loaded from harddisk (floppy even, in some circumstances).
I think when I'm so far, I will find a solution for that.

> The motivation is weaker, you want to prevent the wrong clients from
> running an image, as opposed to preventing the wrong server from
> providing an image. That is, you indicate by keying the image to the
> clients whether it's legal for those clients to run it. You could simply
> not provide the wrong filename to the clients I suppose. I don't think
> it's something important to have.

OK, skipping that client key stuff for now.

Best regards,
 Anselm                            mailto:an...@ho...