Seminar week 3: Secure Boot

Overview

For this week’s seminar, you will learn more about boot security. This is an important topic because the boot process is the first code that runs on a computer, and it is responsible for loading the operating system. If an attacker can compromise the boot process, they can take control of the entire system.

Group assignments: When shopping period ends, we will revisit the group assignment. For now, assume that you’ll go to the same room that you were in last week.

Assigned work: Each weekly seminar will generally assign some readings or other work for you to prepare for in-class discussions. You should complete the prep work before attending seminar each week; once you do, you’ll submit a brief response in a form, along with any questions you have (link below). In general, your responses will be due 11:59pm the day before the seminar, in this case, Thursday, September 24 at 11:59pm.

Readings

  • Watch the first 13 minutes of this video about boot security on Tesla cars. This is a video from a talk about how people broke secure boot on Tesla cars, but the first 13 minutes of the talk is a good overview of how secure boot works. You’re welcome to watch the rest of the talk if you want (it talks about a fascinating physical “voltage glitching” attack that allowed the researchers to bypass secure boot), but you don’t need to for this seminar.

  • Then, read several boot-lreated sections of the the Apple Platform Security document. You should read the sections labeled “The Secure Enclave” (page 10) and “Secure Boot” up to “Reduced Security Policy” (page 30-36).

What you should turn in

By Thursday, September 24 at 11:59pm, fill out this form with brief responses to the following questions:

  • Describe, in your own words, how secure boot ensures that only trusted software can run on system (e.g., a car). Pay particular attention to the mechanism used to anchor trust in hardware: all software can be replaced or modified, but hardware cannot be.

  • Please ask us a question about secure boot.

Once again, your goal is not to understand every detail, but to begin parsing some technical documents based on what we’ve seen so far. We’ll use this, and your questions, as a starting point for our discussion.