[U-Boot] UBI/UBIFS complete integrity check

Lukasz Majewski lukma at denx.de
Sat Nov 4 21:17:07 UTC 2017


Hi Liam,

> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm currently using a UBIFS root file system (stored on SPI-NOR flash)
> and would like to perform a full integrity check before booting it.
> The rootfs is read-only and until now, I've been computing an md5sum
> on the whole mtd device from an initramfs and comparing it to a stored
> md5sum. If both md5sums don't match, I need to stop the boot process
> completely.
> 
> If possible, I was hoping to drop initramfs and do the integrity check
> from U-Boot. 

U-boot has support for crc32 and sha1 (256). It should be possible to
do the integrity checking in it.

If you have more SDRAM than SPI-NOR, then you can calculate sha1/crc32
of the whole memory.

> I know UBI/UBIFS does a CRC-32 of the data it writes to
> flash but the intent here is to prevent booting an image where
> even a _single bit_ of flash may have been corrupted.

Ok. I see.

> 
> My question is, does UBI/UBIFS have this kind of complete integrity
> check built-in? 

As fair as I'm aware - not. The only recent improvement was the
"encryption/decryption" support.

> If not, can I take advantage of these CRC-32, 

It may be hard to access UBI metadata (from PEB/LEB).

> to do
> something equivalent to my md5sum check from U-Boot.

It may be possible to read the whole SPI-NOR Memory content to RAM,
calculate crc32/sha1 and compare with some stored value (e.g. in u-boot
envs). This all should be done with u-boot prompt.

> Thanks,
> 
> Liam Beguin
> Xiphos Systems Corp.
> http://xiphos.com
> _______________________________________________
> U-Boot mailing list
> U-Boot at lists.denx.de
> https://lists.denx.de/listinfo/u-boot



Best regards,

Lukasz Majewski

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