Description
In EVE OS, the “measured boot” mechanism prevents a compromised device from accessing
the encrypted data located in the vault.
As per the “measured boot” design, the PCR values calculated at different stages of the boot
process will change if any of their respective parts are changed.
This includes, among other things, the configuration of the bios, grub, the kernel cmdline,
initrd, and more.
However, this mechanism does not validate the entire rootfs, so an attacker can edit the
filesystem and gain control over the system.
As the default filesystem used by EVE OS is squashfs, this is somewhat harder than an ext4,
which is easily changeable.
This will not stop an attacker, as an attacker can repackage the squashfs with their changes
in it and replace the partition altogether.
This can also be done directly on the device, as the “003-storage-init” container contains the
“mksquashfs” and “unsquashfs” binaries (with the corresponding libs).
An attacker can gain full control over the device without changing the PCR values, thus not
triggering the “measured boot” mechanism, and having full access to the vault.
Note:
This issue was partially fixed in these commits (after disclosure to Zededa), where the config
partition measurement was added to PCR13:
• aa3501d6c57206ced222c33aea15a9169d629141
• 5fef4d92e75838cc78010edaed5247dfbdae1889.
This issue was made viable in version 9.0.0 when the calculation was moved to PCR14 but it was not included in the measured boot.
Understanding This Vulnerability
This Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) entry provides detailed information about a security vulnerability that has been publicly disclosed. CVEs are standardized identifiers assigned by MITRE Corporation to track and catalog security vulnerabilities across software and hardware products.
The severity rating (HIGH) indicates the potential impact of this vulnerability based on the CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) framework. Higher severity ratings typically indicate vulnerabilities that could lead to more significant security breaches if exploited. Security teams should prioritize remediation efforts based on severity, exploit availability, and the EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) score, which predicts the likelihood of exploitation in the wild.
If this vulnerability affects products or systems in your infrastructure, we recommend reviewing the affected products section, checking for available patches or updates from vendors, and implementing recommended workarounds or solutions until a permanent fix is available. Organizations should also monitor security advisories and threat intelligence feeds for updates about active exploitation of this vulnerability.