fwupd porting process to the *BSDs by Norbert Kamiński
Channel: EuroBSDcon
Date: 2021-09-27

The security of the whole system is not determined only by the software it runs, but also by the firmware. Firmware is a piece of software inseparable from the hardware. It is responsible for proper hardware initialization as well as its security features. That means that the security of the machine strongly depends on the mitigations of vulnerabilities provided by firmware (like microcode updates, bug/exploit fixes). For these particular reasons, the firmware should be kept up-to-date.

Nowadays, one of the most popular firmware update software is fwupd/LVFS. fwupd is a Linux daemon that manages firmware updates of each of your hardware components that have some kind of firmware. What is more fwupd is open source, which makes it more trustworthy than proprietary applications delivered by hardware vendors designed for (only) their devices.

This presentation will describe the process of porting the fwupd project to the BSD distributions (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD). It will explain the challenges that we faced during the development process. The fwupd port extends the functionality of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) to the BSD family of operating systems. It will be a development story that shows the challenges we overcame and the successes we achieved during the implementation. In the end, I will show short demo of the firmware update process. There will also be time for Q&A.

Norbert Kamiński
Embedded Systems Engineer at 3mdeb focused on BSD and Linux based solutions. Lately works on secure firmware update methods. A huge fan of virtualization.
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