Monthly Archives: February 2017

Disabling Secure Boot on Intel Quark “secure SKU” silicon

Secure Boot is a bit like SELinux: people who use it really like it, and tell all their friends to use it. For everyone else, apart from those who don’t know about or even notice Secure Boot, it’s an annoyance that they almost immediately disable.

We’ve looked at the Intel DK200 from a hardware perspective before. Now it’s time to look at it from a software perspective. “Internet of Things Gateway” is pretty generic, so what can it actually do?

Following the instructions, I tried to register the system on Intel’s website so I could download the Wind River Intelligent Device Platform XT 2.0 SDK. I didn’t get very far:

No WindRiver SDK for you

Stormtrooper #1: This is not the product you’re looking for

Yeah… I guess this is what Mouser meant when they said the DK200 was End of Life.

Since this ships with the Linux Kernel, which is GPLv2 licensed, I believe Intel may be violating the GPL. Specifically:

Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange

But I am not a lawyer, and I am not really that interested in starting a legal battle over the source code for an ancient version of Wind River Linux I am not interested in using anyway.

So let’s go try to build Yocto. The Intel rep did say there was a Yocto BSP coming “soon” but “soon” in Intel time seems kind of variable.

After some hiccups (Yocto needs python2 and GCC <6) I had built a Yocto image and put it on an SD card. Does it boot?

...no

…no

So we can’t boot Yocto because this is a “secure SKU” which means Secure Boot is enabled. Is there some way we can disable Secure Boot? What about updating the BSP to a newer version with Secure Boot disabled?

Back to hardware
If I’ve learned anything from messing around with electronics, you want to make a backup before you start modifying things. This is doubly so if the data in question is related to the booting process. It sucks to end up with a brick, so make a backup!

Taking a backup of flash

Taking a backup of flash

The Intel Quark guide mentions using a Dediprog SF100 to flash EDKII. I don’t have a Dediprog, but I do have an SPI programmer. Unfortunately, none of the Intel documentation I could find mentions the Dediprog header on the DK200, so I had to go hunting.

I traced the pins from the Winbond flash to header J23. J23 is only 8 pins, so trial and error with a multimeter to find the pin mapping wasn’t terrible:

J23 pinout

J23 pinout

Here’s the pinout of J23 in text form:

J23 pin 25Q64 pin Pin description
1 8 VCC
2 4 GND
3 1 /CS
4 6 CLK
5 2 DO
6 5 DI
7 Not connected
8 Not connected

/WP and HOLD pins on the 25Q64FV are not routed to J23, but they aren’t required for flashing.

With the pinout known, I could attach the SPI programmer to the header instead of using the chip clip:

J23 to ch341a SPI programmer

J23 to ch341a SPI programmer

I took a dump of the Winbond 25Q64FV and then for good measure desoldered the chip and read it again to confirm the images were exactly the same. It was strange because the image from the chip clip wasn’t identical. But, the image from the desoldered chip was identical to the image taken from J23, so we’re done here. I wrote the image to a new 25Q64FV and soldered that back onto the board.

Firmware disassembly
Disassembling the firmware which shipped on my DK200, we see that a Secure Boot certificate was created by WindRiver.

I assume that had I been able to download the WindRiver SDK, I would have been able to build and sign Secure Boot with my own certificates. Given that industrial customers spend a lot of time and money worrying about security, I was surprised to see that the Secure Boot certificate in the firmware was created by WindRiver China.

I did try to load up the image in IDA, but not being a power user of IDA, I couldn’t figure out how to get it to analyze the SPI dump, and gave up to try and compile the firmware from source.

Building the BSP

Being Intel, there are hundreds of pages you can read about developing for EDK2 and other really fun things, probably. I didn’t read them.

A document which I did end up reading religiously was the Intel ® QuarkTM SoC X1000 Board Support Package (BSP) Build and Software User Guide [PDF] which describes how to build all the firmware components needed to bring up the X1000 SoC. I found out there is actually a newer version of this document (1.2.1 instead of 1.1) and there are some important differences between the documents I want to get to later.

By building the firmware, we’re hoping for one of two outcomes:

  1. A firmware with our own Secure Boot certificates, or
  2. A firmware which has Secure Boot disabled

Version 1.1 of the BSP Build and Software User Guide includes a section on pages 29 and 30 on how to bundle your own db, kek, and pk certificates:

Page 29 and 30 condensed

Unfortunately if you follow the instructions and try to use a layout.conf which specifies these files, you’ll get an error because there’s no address specified for this data in the image:

I do have a reference file from WindRiver with Secure Boot certificates, so if I was really interested in making Secure Boot work as intended, I could have reverse engineered the address to store the certificates.

The certificates section of layout.conf was removed from the 1.2.1 revision of the BSP Build and Software User Guide. I guess since it no longer works, Intel decided to remove it from the documentation.

So, we can’t install our own Secure Boot certificates in the firmware. What happens if we just leave out the certificates section entirely and build it?

Error 37: Quark signature file not found

Right, so even though there’s now no certificate in the firmware bundle, we still can’t boot.

Interestingly, if you don’t partition the uSD or USB stick correctly, you end up with this pretty screen:

I never saw that in the stock firmware.

Hacking GRUB
So it seems that we can’t include our own Secure Boot certificate in the firmware, due to the sample layout.conf file missing the certificates section, and not knowing the appropriate address to store the certificates.

What if we dig into Error 37: Quark signature file not found a bit more?

If you look in the grub source code included in the BSP, you can see a giant ~1000KB patch that Intel has made to the original upstream code to support the Quark platform.

If you grep for “Quark signature file not found” you’ll find it was added in stage2/common.c:
diff --git a/stage2/common.c b/stage2/common.c
index e96bec2..e122745 100644
--- a/stage2/common.c
+++ b/stage2/common.c
@@ -88,6 +88,8 @@ char *err_list[] =
[ERR_UNRECOGNIZED] = "Unrecognized command",
[ERR_WONT_FIT] = "Selected item cannot fit into memory",
[ERR_WRITE] = "Disk write error",
+ [ERR_QUARK_VERIFICATION] = "Quark signature verification failed",
+ [ERR_SGN_FILE_NOT_FOUND] = "Quark signature file not found",
};

If you grep for ERR_SGN_FILE_NOT_FOUND you’ll find it’s in the following files:
./work/efi/ia32/loader/linux.c:410: errnum = ERR_SGN_FILE_NOT_FOUND;
./work/efi/ia32/loader/linux.c:732: errnum = ERR_SGN_FILE_NOT_FOUND;
./work/efi/quark/boot_settings.c:190: errnum = ERR_SGN_FILE_NOT_FOUND;

Going back to Intel’s modifications to grub, we can see what they added:

It takes a bit of searching, but if you strip out all of the grub_quark_secure logic from linux.c and boot_settings.c, you end up with…

Ta-da! I can boot Yocto Linux

No more Secure Boot!

At the end of the day, the Quark X1000 is an x86: “secure SKU” is nothing but a fuse setting.

The comment should read:

Determine whether or not grub should enforce Secure Boot.

In our case, this is not a mandatory option 😉

Special offer for DK200 owners
As shown above, it is possible to modify the Intel sources to disable Secure Boot. If there are other people have a DK200 from Intel and are interested in running a firmware without Secure Boot, leave a comment with your contact details. Upon request, I can provide a firmware image* with generic Ethernet MAC addresses for you to flash. Note that this firmware is specific to the DK200 (Clanton Hill) hardware.

* No warranty, express or implied, provided for said firmware image. You flash at your own risk!

Reassembling a firmware from pieces

Working on firmware is always interesting. Modern x86 computers are incredibly complicated, due to the evolution of the architecture over the last 40 years, and it’s difficult to debug issues past “Well it doesn’t POST, better try something else.”

Unlike most ARM/MIPS systems, where you have a UART console or something to see output from u-boot, if you mess up the firmware on an x86, you’ll have a non-communicative brick on your hands.

Of course you can also have firmware issues on ARM/MIPS, if you manage to corrupt u-boot on SPI flash, but since u-boot is open and not proprietary it’s easy to rebuild it from source and flash it again to recover.

Not so in the PC world. UEFI is horrendously complex compared to u-boot, and Intel’s reference implementation known as TianoCore is usually “improved” by several middlemen before going into the final product.

Trammel Hudson’s excellent talk from 33c3 (slides) on Bootstrapping a slightly more secure laptop highlights the situation with UEFI quite well:

Farm to table firmware

In this case, we’ve got TianoCore from Intel, insyde adds some magic fairy dust, this goes to Compal (the ODM of this laptop), and finally Dell (who would probably also claim to add magic fairy dust). In the end there’s a lot of proprietary fairy dust floating around, and we probably wouldn’t be able to boot the laptop if we just build TianoCore from source.

TianoCore itself is open source and BSD licensed, which is why all the vendors use it. Intel manages porting TianoCore to their new platforms, and since it’s BSD licensed, it means that someone like insyde can take the working base from Intel and add their proprietary fairy dust without having to release the modified source code.

SPI flash
The start of flash contains a region called the Flash Descriptor (PDF; page 3) which is programmed at system manufacture and tells the system where different firmware components are present on flash. Think of it as a partition table for the system flash. Under normal circumstances, the flash descriptor prevents the user from reading and/or writing portions of ROM. If you try to use tools to read or write the ME regions of flash, you’ll get a error similar to this:

Error 26: The host CPU does not have read access to the target flash area. To en
able read access for this operation you must modify the descriptor settings to g
ive host access to this region.

And this makes sense. If the system allowed unrestricted write access it would be trivial for some malware to write itself into the system firmware, and then you’d have a persistent rootkit. In my opinion, blocking the ability to read portions of the firmware serves no purpose except to discourage reverse engineering attempts.

Thankfully, there is a method known as Flash Descriptor Security Override Strap which can be used to disable the flash descriptor protection.

The first step is to locate the ME_FWP pin in the circuit diagram:
Override Strap

Now that we’ve located the pin on the logical diagram, we need to find the HDA chip itself so we can see which pins we need to bridge to disable the flash descriptor lock on the ME region:
la-7731p_sda

In this case, it’s most convenient for us to short pins 5 and 9:
la-7731p_hda

You could also short pins 1 and 5, but this requires a very steady hand and small instrument. However pins 5 and 9 are connected to surface mount components located away from the chip. These components (a capacitor and a pad) are much easier to access with a wire:
la_7731p_pin5_pin9

Amazingly, this area can be accessed without completely disassembling the laptop. Just taking off the palm rest and keyboard, which is about 8 screws, is enough to access the pins. They’re right under the LVDS cable to the display. Thanks, Compal!

At this point, I have two options:

  1. Find or buy an SPI dump online and flash that
  2. Find a way to dump the firmware from the working laptop without soldering

As you read in the previous post, I only managed to find an E6320 SPI dump online, and ended up with a laptop that worked-ish. I tried for many hours, but I wasn’t able to find any free SPI dumps for the E6230 online. After seeing many forums promising to sell you the firmware for outrageous prices, I finally found one that wanted only 8 złoty ($2) to download the SPI dump for the E6230. Principles be damned, I’ve wasted enough time trying to get this to work. I paid up and downloaded the files for the 4MB and 8MB chips.

Did I really get a valid firmware for $2? Yes!

But it’s BIOS A12, the current version is A16, but none of the Dell update utilities work! I installed Windows to try the update tool from Dell, but the laptop just rebooted without updating the firmware. I tried from FreeDOS and again, the laptop would just reboot when it got to flashing. Hrmm…

So, at this point I’m going to cheat a little: I have a working E6230, but I decided when I started this that I would not touch it with a soldering iron or heat gun. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

Can I get a full firmware dump from the working E6230?

Intel FPT

Intel FPT is a proprietary command-line utility created by Intel for flashing firmware files through the computer’s internal SPI flashing interface.

Alright, let’s go dump the firmware! First you need to remember to apply the Flash Descriptor Security Override Strap, or the CPU will block your read attempt to the ME region.

However, once we’ve done that, FPT will allow us to dump regions of flash to a file.

At first I tried to dump just the ME and BIOS, using the A12 firmware from above, I reflashed these regions using the FPT utility from FreeDOS. The verification of the BIOS region failed, and when I rebooted I had a brick again.

But, the FPT tool lets you dump all the regions at once! I dumped the entire flash, but now we’ve got a 12MB file and I don’t know where the split is between the 8MB and 4MB flash chips.

After more searching, I found the Intel ME System Tools, including a utility called Flash Image Tool, which allows you to import the firmware image file created by FPT.

Well, the flash component density matches what’s in the laptop, so I guess this is correct.

Flash Image Tool also lets you build a new firmware image:

Writing ROM image file “C:\Users\hmartin\Documents\MESYS\Flash Image Tool\v8.1.10.1286\Build\outimage.bin”.
Writing file “C:\Users\hmartin\Documents\MESYS\Flash Image Tool\v8.1.10.1286\Build\outimage(1).bin” (size = 8388608)
Writing file “C:\Users\hmartin\Documents\MESYS\Flash Image Tool\v8.1.10.1286\Build\outimage(2).bin” (size = 4194304)
Writing MAP file “C:\Users\hmartin\Documents\MESYS\Flash Image Tool\v8.1.10.1286\Build\outimage.map”.

Image size = 0xC00000 bytes

Interesting… outimage(1).bin is exactly 8192KB, and outimage(2).bin is exactly 4096KB. I wrote these two images to the respective chips and put them into the laptop. The moment of truth had arrived.

It boots!

When you’re trying to work through firmware issues, it’s really helpful to have the flash chip in a socket. Soldering and desoldering gets really old when you have to do it more than a couple of times.

Thoughts on the sale of firmware images

I’m against the sale of these firmware images. I realize that it takes a non-zero amount of time to get the image, but the whole experience of BIOS forums just leaves you feeling dirty. You have no way to verify before payment that the files they’re providing even work. Combine this with the fact that most websites want $10-$20 for the SPI dump, the experience leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

Is it worth it to pay? It depends entirely on your willingness to pay. Is this your only computer? Do you need it working now? How much of your own time are you willing to invest to learn about UEFI firmware? I’ve probably put 20 hours into this project, and I still don’t understand the internals of UEFI.