Unlocking Disks Earlier: Basic LUKS1 Support Arrives in U-Boot

A new 24-patch series in Concept that introduces basic support for unlocking LUKS1 encrypted partitions directly within U-Boot. This is a foundational step toward a more integrated and user-friendly full-disk encryption (FDE) experience.

🤔 The Problem with “Late” Unlocking

Traditionally, FDE on Linux systems is handled late in the boot process. U-Boot loads a kernel and an initial ramdisk (initramfs), and it’s the initramfs’s job to prompt the user for a passphrase and unlock the main root filesystem.

This common approach works, but it has several drawbacks:

• Firmware is blind: U-Boot has no way of knowing if the boot will succeed until long after it has handed off control.
• Confusing user experience: The passphrase prompt appears late in the boot sequence, sometimes after the vendor logo has disappeared.
• No integrated UI: It’s not possible to create a single, polished firmware UI that handles both boot selection and disk decryption.
• Inflexible for automation: In VM environments where a key might be known in advance, there’s no way for the firmware to use it, so the ramdisk must handle this through attestation, etc.
• Ramdisk is required: You can’t boot from an encrypted disk unless you also use a ramdisk to perform the unlock.

💡 What’s New: The luks Command

This patch series takes a small step to improve this by bringing decryption capabilities into U-Boot itself. The new feature set is centered around the luks command, which allows U-Boot to interact with LUKS-encrypted partitions.

The command introduces three main subcommands:

1. luks detect: Checks if a given partition is a valid LUKS device.
2. luks info: Parses and displays the LUKS header metadata. This works for both LUKS1 and LUKS2 partitions, thanks to a new simple JSON parser included in the series for handling the LUKS2 header.
3. luks unlock: unlocks a LUKS1 partition using a provided passphrase.

Here’s a look at it in action:

=> luks detect mmc 1:2
LUKS1 encrypted partition detected

=> luks info mmc 1:2
Version:         1
Cipher name:     aes
Cipher mode:     cbc-essiv:sha256
Hash spec:       sha256
Payload offset:  4096 sectors
Key bytes:       32

=> luks unlock mmc 1:2 mysecretpassphrase
Unlocked LUKS partition as blkmap device 'luks-mmc-1:2'
=>

🔓 Accessing Decrypted Data via blkmap

Once a partition is unlocked, how do you access the data? The luks unlock command integrates with U-Boot’s blkmap subsystem.

When a partition is successfully unlocked, a new virtual blkmap device is created. This device provides read-only access to the decrypted data on-the-fly.

This means you can now use standard U-Boot commands to read files directly from the encrypted partition, just as if it were a normal, unencrypted disk:

=> ls blkmap 0 /
          ./
          ../
          lost+found/
2481008   vmlinuz-6.8.0-53-generic
1616      initrd.img-6.8.0-53-generic

=> ext4load blkmap 0 ${kernel_addr_r} /vmlinuz-6.8.0-53-generic
2481008 bytes read in 64 ms (37.0 MiB/s)
=>

This simple feature allows U-Boot to load a kernel, read a configuration file, or access any other data from an encrypted volume before booting.

🛠️ Under the Hood: What Made This Possible

There is quite a bit of foundational work included in this series:

• Crypto: The mbedtls library in U-Boot was enhanced to enable PKCS#5 (PBKDF2) functions, which are essential for deriving keys from passphrases in LUKS. A fix for AES-192 and AES-256 key-size handling was also included.
• blkmap Enhancement: The blkmap driver was extended with a new blkmap_map_crypt() function to handle the on-the-fly decryption.
• Testing: A large portion of the series is dedicated to building solid testing infrastructure. This includes updates to the Docker image, CI configuration and new Python test helpers (fs_helper.py) to create, encrypt, and test against real LUKS1 and LUKS2 disk images.

This series lays the groundwork for a more secure and streamlined boot process. While full LUKS2 unlock support and read-write access are topics for another day, this is a step forward.

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