wolfBoot: resilient, quantum-resistant secure boot for all architectures

wolfBoot is an open source secure bootloader developed by wolfSSL Inc. and ported across many architectures. This talk will describe real-life scenarios of deploying quantum resistant and hybrid secure boot mechanisms on embedded systems.

Initially designed in 2018 to implement secure boot on small microcontrollers (ARMv7 Cortex-M), wolfBoot has been then ported to several architectures including ARM Cortex-A, RISC-V, PowerPC, Renesas RX, and more recently it has been deployed in x86_64 as complete bios replacement with Intel FSP. On new ARMv8-M microcontrollers, it can supervise the secure domain and expose an interface to access cryptography from non-secure world.

Based on RFC9019, wolfBoot only uses static memory and has a predictable execution flow at compile time, which makes it suitable to use in safety-critical environments. It relies on wolfCrypt for public key authentication. It offers protection against rollbacks and has some advanced unique features such as delta updates and mitigations against fault injections.

After briefly introducing the project, the talk will focus on the urge to migrate new systems towards securing boot with quantum resistant algorithms in the next decade. We will explore the mechanisms currently provided by wolfBoot to pair PQC (ML-DSA, LMS, XMSS) with classic cryptography (ECC, RSA, ED) to authenticate the signature of the firmware at boot and upon updates.

Repository on github