Comment by hugo1789

13 days ago

That is a critical observation. Last time I had to root an Android device it hat pretty robust defenses like dm-verity and strict SELinux policies (correctly configured) and then everything collapsed because the system loaded a exfat kernel module from an unverified filesystem.

Permitting user-loaded kernel modules effectively invalidates all other security measures.

Naive question: does Linux check checksum of loaded modules? If not I could just replace them and voila?

  • What would it be checking against? There's no central signing authority the way there is with Windows. (I mean I guess a distro could implement that but then how would I load my own custom modules?)

    The kernel provides the option to embed a signing key for kernel modules at compile time. But (AFAIK) you'll need to compile your own kernel to go that route.