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>

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
 ===================