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authorPatrik Torstensson <totte@google.com>2018-03-22 18:18:04 -0700
committerMike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>2018-04-03 15:04:29 -0400
commit843f38d382b1ca2f6f4ae2ef7c35933e6319ffbb (patch)
treea056d2fe94b2bb94ee075b8d1ae6f03d87b81382 /Documentation/device-mapper
parent45354f1eb67224669a1de94dbfcb8bb226be1f74 (diff)
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dm verity: add 'check_at_most_once' option to only validate hashes once
This allows platforms that are CPU/memory contrained to verify data blocks only the first time they are read from the data device, rather than every time. As such, it provides a reduced level of security because only offline tampering of the data device's content will be detected, not online tampering. Hash blocks are still verified each time they are read from the hash device, since verification of hash blocks is less performance critical than data blocks, and a hash block will not be verified any more after all the data blocks it covers have been verified anyway. This option introduces a bitset that is used to check if a block has been validated before or not. A block can be validated more than once as there is no thread protection for the bitset. These changes were developed and tested on entry-level Android Go devices. Signed-off-by: Patrik Torstensson <totte@google.com> Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/device-mapper')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/device-mapper/verity.txt11
1 files changed, 11 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/device-mapper/verity.txt b/Documentation/device-mapper/verity.txt
index 89fd8f9a259f..b3d2e4a42255 100644
--- a/Documentation/device-mapper/verity.txt
+++ b/Documentation/device-mapper/verity.txt
@@ -109,6 +109,17 @@ fec_start <offset>
This is the offset, in <data_block_size> blocks, from the start of the
FEC device to the beginning of the encoding data.
+check_at_most_once
+ Verify data blocks only the first time they are read from the data device,
+ rather than every time. This reduces the overhead of dm-verity so that it
+ can be used on systems that are memory and/or CPU constrained. However, it
+ provides a reduced level of security because only offline tampering of the
+ data device's content will be detected, not online tampering.
+
+ Hash blocks are still verified each time they are read from the hash device,
+ since verification of hash blocks is less performance critical than data
+ blocks, and a hash block will not be verified any more after all the data
+ blocks it covers have been verified anyway.
Theory of operation
===================