The dm-integrity target emulates a block device that has additional
per-sector tags that can be used for storing integrity information.
A general problem with storing integrity tags with every sector is that
writing the sector and the integrity tag must be atomic - i.e. in case of
crash, either both sector and integrity tag or none of them is written.
To guarantee write atomicity the dm-integrity target uses a journal. It
writes sector data and integrity tags into a journal, commits the journal
and then copies the data and integrity tags to their respective location.
The dm-integrity target can be used with the dm-crypt target - in this
situation the dm-crypt target creates the integrity data and passes them
to the dm-integrity target via bio_integrity_payload attached to the bio.
In this mode, the dm-crypt and dm-integrity targets provide authenticated
disk encryption - if the attacker modifies the encrypted device, an I/O
error is returned instead of random data.
The dm-integrity target can also be used as a standalone target, in this
mode it calculates and verifies the integrity tag internally. In this
mode, the dm-integrity target can be used to detect silent data
corruption on the disk or in the I/O path.
Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Milan Broz <gmazyland@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
