Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [TECH TOPIC] Firmware signing

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Tue, 2015-07-28 at 17:18 +0100, David Howells wrote:
> Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net> wrote:
> 
> > Agreed.  See about.  I don't think the concept of trust should be as
> > simple as "we trust" or "we don't trust" -- we should trust certain
> > vendors for certain purposes only.
> 
> How do you deal with a big vendor, like Intel, that makes lots of different
> bits for lots of different purposes?

I don't understand what you think the problem is?  What's not clear
about "we have to trust the vendor".  If they choose to use a single key
for multiple drivers, it's no more or less a problem than if they choose
multiple keys, one for each driver.

I think the trust we're investing is in the provenance of the blob, not
the blob itself, so the firmware can't be substituted with a malicious
version by an outside entity.  If we don't trust the firmware vendor,
then all bets are off and the provenance chain is pretty meaningless.

James