[thudson]

The LinuxBoot kernel establishes a hardware root of trust with the TPM and measures the ROM before bringing up any IO devices, so when it connects to the network it is able to perform a remote attestation as to its state. This way the hosting provider or customer can decide to not provision a node that has somehow been modified by a prior tenant.

For a network booting scenario the LinuxBoot server can use GPG to validate the signature on the kernel that it receives over the network. Additionally, secrets can be sealed in the TPM and only unlocked if the received kernel matches the expected one (and if the local firmware is unmodified).