Re: [PATCHv2] sign-file,extract-cert: use KBUILD_SIGN_PIN in provider mode

From: James Bottomley

Date: Wed Mar 18 2026 - 10:55:06 EST


On Wed, 2026-03-18 at 10:44 -0400, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Wed, 2026-03-18 at 10:02 +0100, Anton Lundin wrote:
> > This adds support for the documented KBUILD_SIGN_PIN functionality
> > to
> > sign-file and extract-cert when built with USE_PKCS11_PROVIDER.
>
> Why would you do this?  It's going to pop up a prompt for a password
> for every module you have ... that can be hundreds to thousands in a
> distribution kernel, so it's unscalable.  The usual way we do this is
> to put the password into an environment variable (insecure but
> scalable) but I suppose if you have a more secure solution there
> might
> be interest.

Sorry, ignore me. I didn't read enough to see this is only plumbing
our current environment variable method into the new store open API we
use for providers which didn't pick up a password method. However, the
thought does occur: if the pkcs11 engine does this by an engine
parameter, wouldn't the provider have an equivalent provider parameter?

Regards,

James