Notes on the implementation of encryption in Android 3.0
Quick summary for 3rd parties.
If you want to enable encryption on your device based on Android 3.0 aka Honeycomb, there are only a few requirements:
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The /data filesystem must be on a device that presents a block device interface. eMMC is used in the first devices. This is because the encryption is done by the dm-crypt layer in the kernel, which works at the block device layer.
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The function get_fs_size() in system/vold/cryptfs.c assumes the filesystem used for /data is ext4. It's just error checking code to make sure the filesystem doesn't extend into the last 16 Kbytes of the partition where the crypto footer is kept. It was useful for development when sizes were changing, but should not be required for release. If you are not using ext4, you can either delete it and the call to it, or fix it to understand the filesystem you are using.
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Most of the code to handle the setup and teardown of the temporary framework is in files that are not usually required to be changed on a per device basis. However, the init.
.rc file will require some changes. All services must be put in one of three classes: core, main or late_state. Services in the core class are not shutdown and restarted when the temporary framework gets the disk password. Services in the main class are restarted when the framework is restarted. Services in late_start are not started until after the temporary framework is restarted. Put services here that are not required to be running while the temporary framework gets the disk password. Also any directories that need to be created on /data that are device specific need to be in the Action for post-fs-data, and that Action must end with the command "setprop vold.post_fs_data_done 1". If your init.
.rc file does not have a post-fs-data Action, then the post-fs-data Action in the main init.rc file must end with the command "setprop vold.post_fs_data_done 1".
How Android encryption works
Disk encryption on Android is based on dm-crypt, which is a kernel feature that works at the block device layer. Therefore, it is not usable with YAFFS, which talks directly to a raw nand flash chip, but does work with emmc and similar flash devices which present themselves to the kernel as a block device. The current preferred filesystem to use on these devices is ext4, though that is independent of whether encryption is used or not.
While the actual encryption work is a standard linux kernel feature, enabling it on an Android device proved somewhat tricky. The Android system tries to avoid incorporating GPL components, so using the cryptsetup command or libdevmapper were not available options. So making the appropriate ioctl(2) calls into the kernel was the best choice. The Android volume daemon (vold) already did this to support moving apps to the SD card, so I chose to leverage that work for whole disk encryption. The actual encryption used for the filesystem for first release is 128 AES with CBC and ESSIV:SHA256. The master key is encrypted with 128 bit AES via calls to the openssl library.
Once it was decided to put the smarts in vold, it became obvious that invoking the encryption features would be done like invoking other vold commands, by adding a new module to vold (called cryptfs) and teaching it various commands. The commands are checkpw, restart, enablecrypto, changepw and cryptocomplete. They will be described in more detail below.
The other big issue was how to get the password from the user on boot. The initial plan was to implement a minimal UI that could be invoked from init in the initial ramdisk, and then init would decrypt and mount /data. However, the UI engineer said that was a lot of work, and suggested instead that init communicate upon startup to tell the framework to pop up the password entry screen, get the password, and then shutdown and have the real framework started. It was decided to go this route, and this then led to a host of other decisions described below. In particular, init set a property to tell the framework to go into the special password entry mode, and that set the stage for much communication between vold, init and the framework using properties. The details are described below.
Finally, there were problems around killing and restarting various services so that /data could be unmounted and remounted. Bringing up the temporary framework to get the user password requires that a tmpfs /data filesystem be mounted, otherwise the framework will not run. But to unmount the tmpfs /data filesystem so the real decrypted /data filesystem could be mounted meant that every process that had open files on the tmpfs /data filesystem had to be killed and restarted on the real /data filesystem. This magic was accomplished by requiring all services to be in 1 of 3 groups: core, main and late_start. Core services are never shut down after starting. main services are shutdown and then restarted after the disk password is entered. late_start services are not started until after /data has been decrypted and mounted. The magic to trigger these actions is by setting the property vold.decrypt to various magic strings, which is described below. Also, a new init command "class_reset" was invented to stop a service, but allow it to be restarted with a "class_start" command. If the command "class_stop" was used instead of the new command "class_reset" the flag SVC_DISABLED was added to the state of any service stopped, which means it would not be started when the command class_start was used on its class.
Booting an encrypted system.
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When init fails to mount /data, it assumes the filesystem is encrypted, and sets several properties: ro.crypto.state = "encrypted" vold.decrypt = 1 It then mounts a /data on a tmpfs ramdisk, using parameters it picks up from ro.crypto.tmpfs_options, which is set in init.rc.
If init was able to mount /data, it sets ro.crypto.state to "unencrypted".
In either case, init then sets 5 properties to save the initial mount options given for /data in these properties: ro.crypto.fs_type ro.crypto.fs_real_blkdev ro.crypto.fs_mnt_point ro.crypto.fs_options ro.crypto.fs_flags (saved as an ascii 8 digit hex number preceded by 0x)
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The framework starts up, and sees that vold.decrypt is set to "1". This tells the framework that it is booting on a tmpfs /data disk, and it needs to get the user password. First, however, it needs to make sure that the disk was properly encrypted. It sends the command "cryptfs cryptocomplete" to vold, and vold returns 0 if encryption was completed successfully, or -1 on internal error, or -2 if encryption was not completed successfully. Vold determines this by looking in the crypto footer for the CRYPTO_ENCRYPTION_IN_PROGRESS flag. If it's set, the encryption process was interrupted, and there is no usable data on the device. If vold returns an error, the UI should pop up a message saying the user needs to reboot and factory reset the device, and give the user a button to press to do so.
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Assuming the "cryptfs cryptocomplete" command returned success, the framework should pop up a UI asking for the disk password. The UI then sends the command "cryptfs checkpw
" to vold. If the password is correct (which is determined by successfully mounting the decrypted at a temporary location, then unmounting it), vold saves the name of the decrypted block device in the property ro.crypto.fs_crypto_blkdev, and returns status 0 to the UI. If the password is incorrect, it returns -1 to the UI. -
The UI puts up a crypto boot graphic, and then calls vold with the command "cryptfs restart". vold sets the property vold.decrypt to "trigger_reset_main", which causes init.rc to do "class_reset main". This stops all services in the main class, which allows the tmpfs /data to be unmounted. vold then mounts the decrypted real /data partition, and then preps the new partition (which may never have been prepped if it was encrypted with the wipe option, which is not supported on first release). It sets the property vold.post_fs_data_done to "0", and then sets vold.decrypt to "trigger_post_fs_dat". This causes init.rc to run the post-fs-data commands in init.rc and init.
.rc. They will create any necessary directories, links, et al, and then set vold.post_fs_data_done to "1". Vold waits until it sees the "1" in that property. Finally, vold sets the property vold.decrypt to "trigger_restart_framework" which causes init.rc to start services in class main again, and also start services in class late_start for the first time since boot. Now the framework boots all its services using the decrypted /data filesystem, and the system is ready for use.
Enabling encryption on the device.
For first release, we only support encrypt in place, which requires the framework to be shutdown, /data unmounted, and then every sector of the device encrypted, after which the device reboots to go through the process described above. Here are the details:
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From the UI, the user selects to encrypt the device. The UI ensures that there is a full charge on the battery, and the AC adapter is plugged in. It does this to make sure there is enough power to finish the encryption process, because if the device runs out of power and shuts down before it has finished encrypting, file data is left in a partially encrypted state, and the device must be factory reset (and all data lost).
Once the user presses the final button to encrypt the device, the UI calls vold with the command "cryptfs enablecrypto inplace
" where passwd is the user's lock screen password. -
vold does some error checking, and returns -1 if it can't encrypt, and prints a reason in the log. If it thinks it can, it sets the property vold.decrypt to "trigger_shutdown_framework". This causes init.rc to stop services in the classes late_start and main. vold then unmounts /mnt/sdcard and then /data.
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If doing an inplace encryption, vold then mounts a tmpfs /data (using the tmpfs options from ro.crypto.tmpfs_options) and sets the property vold.encrypt_progress to "0". It then preps the tmpfs /data filesystem as mentioned in step 3 for booting an encrypted system, and then sets the property vold.decrypt to "trigger_restart_min_framework". This causes init.rc to start the main class of services. When the framework sees that vold.encrypt_progress is set to "0", it will bring up the progress bar UI, which queries that property every 5 seconds and updates a progress bar.
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vold then sets up the crypto mapping, which creates a virtual crypto block device that maps onto the real block device, but encrypts each sector as it is written, and decrypts each sector as it is read. vold then creates and writes out the crypto footer.
The crypto footer contains details on the type of encryption, and an encrypted copy of the master key to decrypt the filesystem. The master key is a 128 bit number created by reading from /dev/urandom. It is encrypted with a hash of the user password created with the PBKDF2 function from the SSL library. The footer also contains a random salt (also read from /dev/urandom) used to add entropy to the hash from PBKDF2, and prevent rainbow table attacks on the password. Also, the flag CRYPT_ENCRYPTION_IN_PROGRESS is set in the crypto footer to detect failure to complete the encryption process. See the file cryptfs.h for details on the crypto footer layout. The crypto footer is kept in the last 16 Kbytes of the partition, and the /data filesystem cannot extend into that part of the partition.
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If told was to enable encryption with wipe, vold invokes the command "make_ext4fs" on the crypto block device, taking care to not include the last 16 Kbytes of the partition in the filesystem.
If the command was to enable inplace, vold starts a loop to read each sector of the real block device, and then write it to the crypto block device. This takes about an hour on a 30 Gbyte partition on the Motorola Xoom. This will vary on other hardware. The loop updates the property vold.encrypt_progress every time it encrypts another 1 percent of the partition. The UI checks this property every 5 seconds and updates the progress bar when it changes.
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When either encryption method has finished successfully, vold clears the flag ENCRYPTION_IN_PROGRESS in the footer, and reboots the system. If the reboot fails for some reason, vold sets the property vold.encrypt_progress to "error_reboot_failed" and the UI should display a message asking the user to press a button to reboot. This is not expected to ever occur.
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If vold detects an error during the encryption process, and if no data has been destroyed yet and the framework is up, vold sets the property vold.encrypt_progress to "error_not_encrypted" and the UI should give the user the option to reboot, telling them that the encryption process never started. If the error occurs after the framework has been torn down, but before the progress bar UI is up, vold will just reboot the system. If the reboot fails, it sets vold.encrypt_progress to "error_shutting_down" and returns -1, but there will not be anyone to catch the error. This is not expected to happen.
If vold detects an error during the encryption process, it sets vold.encrypt_progress to "error_partially_encrypted" and returns -1. The UI should then display a message saying the encryption failed, and provide a button for the user to factory reset the device.
Changing the password
To change the password for the disk encryption, the UI sends the command
"cryptfs changepw
Summary of related properties
Here is a table summarizing the various properties, their possible values, and what they mean:
vold.decrypt 1 Set by init to tell the UI to ask
for the disk pw
vold.decrypt trigger_reset_main Set by vold to shutdown the UI
asking for the disk password
vold.decrypt trigger_post_fs_data Set by vold to prep /data with
necessary dirs, et al.
vold.decrypt trigger_restart_framework Set by vold to start the real
framework and all services
vold.decrypt trigger_shutdown_framework Set by vold to shutdown the full
framework to start encryption
vold.decrypt trigger_restart_min_framework Set by vold to start the progress
bar UI for encryption.
vold.enrypt_progress When the framework starts up, if
this property is set, enter the
progress bar UI mode.
vold.encrypt_progress 0 to 100 The progress bar UI should display
the percentage value set.
vold.encrypt_progress error_partially_encrypted The progress bar UI should
display a message that the
encryption failed, and give
the user an option to factory
reset the device.
vold.encrypt_progress error_reboot_failed The progress bar UI should display
a message saying encryption
completed, and give the user a
button to reboot the device.
This error is not expected to
happen.
vold.encrypt_progress error_not_encrypted The progress bar UI should display
a message saying an error occured,
and no data was encrypted or lost,
and give the user a button to
reboot the system.
vold.encrypt_progress error_shutting_down The progress bar UI is not
running, so it's unclear who
will respond to this error,
and it should never happen
anyway.
vold.post_fs_data_done 0 Set by vold just before setting
vold.decrypt to
trigger_post_fs_data.
vold.post_fs_data_done 1 Set by init.rc or init.<device>.rc
just after finishing the task
post-fs-data.
ro.crypto.fs_crypto_blkdev Set by the vold command checkpw
for later use by the vold command
restart.
ro.crypto.state unencrypted Set by init to say this system is
running with an unencrypted /data
ro.crypto.state encrypted Set by init to say this system is
running with an encrypted /data
ro.crypto.fs_type These 5 properties are set by init
ro.crypto.fs_real_blkdev when it tries to mount /data with
ro.crypto.fs_mnt_point parameters passed in from init.rc.
ro.crypto.fs_options vold uses these to setup the
ro.crypto.fs_flags crypto mapping.
ro.crypto.tmpfs_options Set by init.rc with the options
init should use when mounting
the tmpfs /data filesystem.
Summary of new init actions
A list of the new Actions that are added to init.rc and/or init.
on post-fs-data
on nonencrypted
on property:vold.decrypt=trigger_reset_main
on property:vold.decrypt=trigger_post_fs_data
on property:vold.decrypt=trigger_restart_min_framework
on property:vold.decrypt=trigger_restart_framework
on property:vold.decrypt=trigger_shutdown_framework