From a5c03c31af2291f13689d11760c0b59fb70c9a5a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Matthew Garrett Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2018 09:10:02 +0000 Subject: x86/efi: Clarify that reset attack mitigation needs appropriate userspace Some distributions have turned on the reset attack mitigation feature, which is designed to force the platform to clear the contents of RAM if the machine is shut down uncleanly. However, in order for the platform to be able to determine whether the shutdown was clean or not, userspace has to be configured to clear the MemoryOverwriteRequest flag on shutdown - otherwise the firmware will end up clearing RAM on every reboot, which is unnecessarily time consuming. Add some additional clarity to the kconfig text to reduce the risk of systems being configured this way. Signed-off-by: Matthew Garrett Acked-by: Ard Biesheuvel Cc: Linus Torvalds Cc: Peter Zijlstra Cc: Thomas Gleixner Cc: linux-efi@vger.kernel.org Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar --- drivers/firmware/efi/Kconfig | 5 ++++- 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) (limited to 'drivers/firmware/efi/Kconfig') diff --git a/drivers/firmware/efi/Kconfig b/drivers/firmware/efi/Kconfig index aab108e82f78..6047ed4e8a3d 100644 --- a/drivers/firmware/efi/Kconfig +++ b/drivers/firmware/efi/Kconfig @@ -159,7 +159,10 @@ config RESET_ATTACK_MITIGATION using the TCG Platform Reset Attack Mitigation specification. This protects against an attacker forcibly rebooting the system while it still contains secrets in RAM, booting another OS and extracting the - secrets. + secrets. This should only be enabled when userland is configured to + clear the MemoryOverwriteRequest flag on clean shutdown after secrets + have been evicted, since otherwise it will trigger even on clean + reboots. endmenu -- cgit v1.2.3-59-g8ed1b