- all: coreboot NO_POST for all boards - all: coreboot NO_GFX_INIT (linux payload does the graphic init) - all: coreboot TPM_MEASURED_BOOT (no more patches under Heads for measured boot) - all: coreboot DRIVERS_PS2_KEYBOARD (fixes no keyboard on soft reboot and potentially xx30t xx20t fix for random raw keyboard (to be tested) - all: coreboot removal of DEFAULT_CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL_5 under some boards - all: coreboot removal of "loglevel=3" under some linux command line options booting Heads kernel - all: coreboot removal of DEBUG_SMM_RELOCATION (unneeded) - all: coreboot INCLUDE_CONFIG_FILE and COLLECT_TIMESTAMPS for all boards - all: coreboot CONSOLE_SERIAL present on all boards - all: coreboot add VBT - all: board configs switch to cryptsetup2 xx20 hotp-maximized boards: - removal of dropbear (not enough space to have htop + dropbear) txx0 boards coreboot: - USE_OPTION_TABLE and STATIC_OPTION_TABLE added (todo: check T430 boards optimization and find issue/PR and ammend this commit)
Heads: the other side of TAILS
Heads is a configuration for laptops and servers that tries to bring more security to commodity hardware. Among its goals are:
- Use free software on the boot path
- Move the root of trust into hardware (or at least the ROM bootblock)
- Measure and attest to the state of the firmware
- Measure and verify all filesystems
NOTE: It is a work in progress and not yet ready for non-technical users. If you're interested in contributing, please get in touch. Installation requires disassembly of your laptop or server, external SPI flash programmers, possible risk of destruction and significant frustration.
More information is available in the 33C3 presentation of building "Slightly more secure systems".
Documentation
Please refer to Heads-wiki for your Heads' documentation needs.
Building heads
make BOARD=board_name
where board_name is the name of the board directory under ./boards
directory.
In order to build reproducible firmware images, Heads builds a specific
version of gcc and uses it to compile the Linux kernel and various tools
that go into the initrd. Unfortunately this means the first step is a
little slow since it will clone the musl-cross-make
tree and build gcc...
Once that is done, the top level Makefile
will handle most of the
remaining details -- it downloads the various packages, verifies the
hashes, applies Heads specific patches, configures and builds them
with the cross compiler, and then copies the necessary parts into
the initrd
directory.
There are still dependencies on the build system's coreutils in
/bin
and /usr/bin/
, but any problems should be detectable if you
end up with a different hash than the official builds.
The various components that are downloaded are in the ./modules
directory and include:
We also recommend installing Qubes OS,
although there Heads can kexec
into any Linux or
multiboot
kernel.
Notes:
- Building coreboot's cross compilers can take a while. Luckily this is only done once.
- Builds are finally reproducible! The reproduciblebuilds tag tracks any regressions.
- Currently only tested in QEMU, the Thinkpad x230, Librem series and the Chell Chromebook.
** Xen and the TPM do not work in QEMU, so it is only for testing the
initrd
image. - Building for the Lenovo X220 requires binary blobs to be placed in the blobs/x220/ folder. See the readme.md file in that folder
- Building for the Librem 13 v2/v3 or Librem 15 v3/v4 requires binary blobs to be placed in the blobs/librem_skl folder. See the readme.md file in that folder
coreboot console messages
The coreboot console messages are stored in the CBMEM region
and can be read by the Linux payload with the cbmem --console | less
command. There is lots of interesting data about the state of the
system.