Signing and verification

The goal for Mender is to provide a robust and secure software update process. An important part of this is to give the Mender Client the ability to verify that the update comes from a trusted source.

One way of achieving this is to sign the Artifact using a protected private key, which is stored and used on a Signing system. The Mender Client can then verify it using the corresponding public key. If the signature verification check passes, the update is considered to come from a trusted source.

Signature management flow

The following diagram shows the high level flow of creating and managing keys and Artifact signatures, which are the essential part of the Artifact signing and verification process.

The process begins with provisioning a device with the public verification key, and configuring the Mender Client to use the key (with the ArtifactVerifyKey configuration option). After an image is built, it gets signed by the Signing system.

After the Artifact is created and signed it can be uploaded to the Mender Server, where the Mender Client will download it from. During the update installation process, the Mender Client will verify the Artifact using the corresponding public key that it was provisioned with. The Artifact will only be installed if the verification is successful. If Artifacts are not signed or the verification fails, the update process will be aborted and the Mender Client will report an error to the Mender Server.

Supported signing algorithms

The following signing algorithms are supported by the Mender:

• RSA with recommended key length of at least 3072 bits
• ECDSA with curve P-256

Generating keys

In order to sign and later on verify the signature of the Mender Artifact we need to generate a private and public key pair. Please follow the respective section below, depending on the signature algorithm you want to use.

After generating the keys you will have a file private.key, which is only used by the Signing system, as well as public.key which you provision all the devices with.

RSA

Generating a private RSA key can be done by executing the command below:

openssl genpkey -algorithm RSA -out private.key -pkeyopt rsa_keygen_bits:3072
openssl rsa -in private.key -out private.key

To extract a public key from the private key use following command:

openssl rsa -in private.key -out public.key -pubout

ECDSA256

In order to generate a public and private ECDSA key pair use the commands below:

openssl ecparam -genkey -name prime256v1 -out private-and-params.key
openssl ec -in private-and-params.key -out private.key
openssl ec -in private-and-params.key -pubout -out public.key

The resulting private.key and public.key files are the private and public keys, respectively.

Signing

We can use the mender-artifact tool to create a signed Artifact. If you use Linux, download the prebuilt mender-artifact binary, otherwise compile it for your platform.

To sign we use the -k parameter to specify the private key, which will be used for creating the signature. This parameter works both if you have a root file system (e.g. .ext4 file) and are writing a new Mender Artifact and if you are signing an existing Mender Artifact (.mender).

A raw root file system

mender-artifact write rootfs-image -t beaglebone -n mender-1.0.1 -f core-image-base-beaglebone.ext4 -k private.key -o artifact-signed.mender

An existing Mender Artifact

cp artifact.mender artifact-signed.mender
mender-artifact modify artifact-signed.mender -k private.key

The latter is typically the command the Signing system uses to create a signed Artifact, as a Mender Artifact is built by the build system already.

Verifying the signature

After a signed Artifact is created, it can be verified with mender-artifact as well. To verify the signature, again use the -k option, but this time with the location of the public verification key.

mender-artifact validate artifact-signed.mender -k public.key

Enable Mender Client signature verification

To make it easier to provision your devices with the public verification key and corresponding Mender Client configuration, Mender has integration with the Yocto Project. Please refer to the documentation for Artifact signing and verification keys to see how to include them.