1=========
2dm-verity
3=========
4
5Device-Mapper's "verity" target provides transparent integrity checking of
6block devices using a cryptographic digest provided by the kernel crypto API.
7This target is read-only.
8
9Construction Parameters
10=======================
11
12::
13
14    <version> <dev> <hash_dev>
15    <data_block_size> <hash_block_size>
16    <num_data_blocks> <hash_start_block>
17    <algorithm> <digest> <salt>
18    [<#opt_params> <opt_params>]
19
20<version>
21    This is the type of the on-disk hash format.
22
23    0 is the original format used in the Chromium OS.
24      The salt is appended when hashing, digests are stored continuously and
25      the rest of the block is padded with zeroes.
26
27    1 is the current format that should be used for new devices.
28      The salt is prepended when hashing and each digest is
29      padded with zeroes to the power of two.
30
31<dev>
32    This is the device containing data, the integrity of which needs to be
33    checked.  It may be specified as a path, like /dev/sdaX, or a device number,
34    <major>:<minor>.
35
36<hash_dev>
37    This is the device that supplies the hash tree data.  It may be
38    specified similarly to the device path and may be the same device.  If the
39    same device is used, the hash_start should be outside the configured
40    dm-verity device.
41
42<data_block_size>
43    The block size on a data device in bytes.
44    Each block corresponds to one digest on the hash device.
45
46<hash_block_size>
47    The size of a hash block in bytes.
48
49<num_data_blocks>
50    The number of data blocks on the data device.  Additional blocks are
51    inaccessible.  You can place hashes to the same partition as data, in this
52    case hashes are placed after <num_data_blocks>.
53
54<hash_start_block>
55    This is the offset, in <hash_block_size>-blocks, from the start of hash_dev
56    to the root block of the hash tree.
57
58<algorithm>
59    The cryptographic hash algorithm used for this device.  This should
60    be the name of the algorithm, like "sha1".
61
62<digest>
63    The hexadecimal encoding of the cryptographic hash of the root hash block
64    and the salt.  This hash should be trusted as there is no other authenticity
65    beyond this point.
66
67<salt>
68    The hexadecimal encoding of the salt value.
69
70<#opt_params>
71    Number of optional parameters. If there are no optional parameters,
72    the optional paramaters section can be skipped or #opt_params can be zero.
73    Otherwise #opt_params is the number of following arguments.
74
75    Example of optional parameters section:
76        1 ignore_corruption
77
78ignore_corruption
79    Log corrupted blocks, but allow read operations to proceed normally.
80
81restart_on_corruption
82    Restart the system when a corrupted block is discovered. This option is
83    not compatible with ignore_corruption and requires user space support to
84    avoid restart loops.
85
86ignore_zero_blocks
87    Do not verify blocks that are expected to contain zeroes and always return
88    zeroes instead. This may be useful if the partition contains unused blocks
89    that are not guaranteed to contain zeroes.
90
91use_fec_from_device <fec_dev>
92    Use forward error correction (FEC) to recover from corruption if hash
93    verification fails. Use encoding data from the specified device. This
94    may be the same device where data and hash blocks reside, in which case
95    fec_start must be outside data and hash areas.
96
97    If the encoding data covers additional metadata, it must be accessible
98    on the hash device after the hash blocks.
99
100    Note: block sizes for data and hash devices must match. Also, if the
101    verity <dev> is encrypted the <fec_dev> should be too.
102
103fec_roots <num>
104    Number of generator roots. This equals to the number of parity bytes in
105    the encoding data. For example, in RS(M, N) encoding, the number of roots
106    is M-N.
107
108fec_blocks <num>
109    The number of encoding data blocks on the FEC device. The block size for
110    the FEC device is <data_block_size>.
111
112fec_start <offset>
113    This is the offset, in <data_block_size> blocks, from the start of the
114    FEC device to the beginning of the encoding data.
115
116check_at_most_once
117    Verify data blocks only the first time they are read from the data device,
118    rather than every time.  This reduces the overhead of dm-verity so that it
119    can be used on systems that are memory and/or CPU constrained.  However, it
120    provides a reduced level of security because only offline tampering of the
121    data device's content will be detected, not online tampering.
122
123    Hash blocks are still verified each time they are read from the hash device,
124    since verification of hash blocks is less performance critical than data
125    blocks, and a hash block will not be verified any more after all the data
126    blocks it covers have been verified anyway.
127
128Theory of operation
129===================
130
131dm-verity is meant to be set up as part of a verified boot path.  This
132may be anything ranging from a boot using tboot or trustedgrub to just
133booting from a known-good device (like a USB drive or CD).
134
135When a dm-verity device is configured, it is expected that the caller
136has been authenticated in some way (cryptographic signatures, etc).
137After instantiation, all hashes will be verified on-demand during
138disk access.  If they cannot be verified up to the root node of the
139tree, the root hash, then the I/O will fail.  This should detect
140tampering with any data on the device and the hash data.
141
142Cryptographic hashes are used to assert the integrity of the device on a
143per-block basis. This allows for a lightweight hash computation on first read
144into the page cache. Block hashes are stored linearly, aligned to the nearest
145block size.
146
147If forward error correction (FEC) support is enabled any recovery of
148corrupted data will be verified using the cryptographic hash of the
149corresponding data. This is why combining error correction with
150integrity checking is essential.
151
152Hash Tree
153---------
154
155Each node in the tree is a cryptographic hash.  If it is a leaf node, the hash
156of some data block on disk is calculated. If it is an intermediary node,
157the hash of a number of child nodes is calculated.
158
159Each entry in the tree is a collection of neighboring nodes that fit in one
160block.  The number is determined based on block_size and the size of the
161selected cryptographic digest algorithm.  The hashes are linearly-ordered in
162this entry and any unaligned trailing space is ignored but included when
163calculating the parent node.
164
165The tree looks something like:
166
167	alg = sha256, num_blocks = 32768, block_size = 4096
168
169::
170
171                                 [   root    ]
172                                /    . . .    \
173                     [entry_0]                 [entry_1]
174                    /  . . .  \                 . . .   \
175         [entry_0_0]   . . .  [entry_0_127]    . . . .  [entry_1_127]
176           / ... \             /   . . .  \             /           \
177     blk_0 ... blk_127  blk_16256   blk_16383      blk_32640 . . . blk_32767
178
179
180On-disk format
181==============
182
183The verity kernel code does not read the verity metadata on-disk header.
184It only reads the hash blocks which directly follow the header.
185It is expected that a user-space tool will verify the integrity of the
186verity header.
187
188Alternatively, the header can be omitted and the dmsetup parameters can
189be passed via the kernel command-line in a rooted chain of trust where
190the command-line is verified.
191
192Directly following the header (and with sector number padded to the next hash
193block boundary) are the hash blocks which are stored a depth at a time
194(starting from the root), sorted in order of increasing index.
195
196The full specification of kernel parameters and on-disk metadata format
197is available at the cryptsetup project's wiki page
198
199  https://gitlab.com/cryptsetup/cryptsetup/wikis/DMVerity
200
201Status
202======
203V (for Valid) is returned if every check performed so far was valid.
204If any check failed, C (for Corruption) is returned.
205
206Example
207=======
208Set up a device::
209
210  # dmsetup create vroot --readonly --table \
211    "0 2097152 verity 1 /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 4096 4096 262144 1 sha256 "\
212    "4392712ba01368efdf14b05c76f9e4df0d53664630b5d48632ed17a137f39076 "\
213    "1234000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
214
215A command line tool veritysetup is available to compute or verify
216the hash tree or activate the kernel device. This is available from
217the cryptsetup upstream repository https://gitlab.com/cryptsetup/cryptsetup/
218(as a libcryptsetup extension).
219
220Create hash on the device::
221
222  # veritysetup format /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2
223  ...
224  Root hash: 4392712ba01368efdf14b05c76f9e4df0d53664630b5d48632ed17a137f39076
225
226Activate the device::
227
228  # veritysetup create vroot /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 \
229    4392712ba01368efdf14b05c76f9e4df0d53664630b5d48632ed17a137f39076
230