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docs/composefs: Note semantics with Secure Boot disabled
Came up in chat. Signed-off-by: Colin Walters <walters@verbum.org>
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docs/src/experimental-composefs.md

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@@ -45,6 +45,22 @@ Sealed images also require:
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- Secure Boot support in the target system firmware
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- A filesystem with fsverity support (e.g., ext4, btrfs) for the root partition
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#### Using without Secure Boot
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You can use a sealed UKI without Secure Boot enabled. The composefs and mounting
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code is fully orthogonal to Secure Boot - the fsverity digest of the root filesystem
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and all of its contents will still be validated at runtime, which does provide
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an increased level of integrity.
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However: nothing validates that root digest itself, meaning any locally running
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code can replace the UKI (e.g. after a container breakout) and fully control
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the next boot.
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It is intentional to support booting with Secure Boot disabled, because a
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valid use case is to temporarily disable it in order to test a change locally
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on e.g. one machine, then re-enable it later. However at the current time it
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is not yet streamlined to regenerate the UKI locally.
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### Build Pattern: Compute Digest and Generate UKI in One Stage
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The key to building sealed images is using a multi-stage Dockerfile where a separate stage mounts the target rootfs, computes its composefs digest, and generates the signed UKI in one step:

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