BITS and CHIPSEC as coreboot payloads

In this presentation, we would like to present how BITS and CHIPSEC can be utilized on top of coreboot enabled platform to verify the quality of underlying firmware.

Firmware security is mostly about validation and formal development processes. To achieve some level of confidence about firmware implementation quality various tools were developed, of which most notable are CHIPSEC and BITS.

BITS (BIOS Implementation Test Suite) consist of a GRUB2 bootloader extended with runtime Python support.

CHIPSEC is a Platform Security Assessment Framework which mostly focuses on platform configuration but can also be used for other purposes (e.g. verification of Spectre mitigation presence).

We would like to present what issues firmware developers may face and what we were able to achieve at this ground using BITS and CHIPSEC for validation of PC Engines apu2 and MinnowBoard Turbot platform. We want to present what modifications are required to integrated Python code along with CHIPSEC and BITS scripts. We also would like to demonstrate practical usage of mentioned frameworks by showing short demo.