Signing boot images for fastboot

If you have ever seen the error FAILED (remote: bootimage: incomplete or not signed), here’s the solution (at least for the Fairphone 2 😉):

Download the BootSignature.jar file from my server (or compile it yourself from the LineageOS 14.1 tree with the command mka BootSignature).

curl -O https://public.lucaweiss.eu/BootSignature.jar

Download the make_key tool from the LineageOS GitHub.

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LineageOS/android_development/cm-14.1/tools/make_key

Make the script executable

chmod +x make_key

Generate the key with

./make_key keystore '/C=US/ST=California/L=Mountain View/O=Android/OU=Android/CN=Android/emailAddress=android@android.com'

Put the BootSignature.jar, keystore.pk8 and keystore.x509.pem in a directory of your choice.

Put the following script into a location in the PATH (~/bin or /usr/local/bin should be good) and replace the first variable with the location you put the three files in:

#!/bin/bash

KEYSTORE_TOOLS=/location/to/jar_and_certs

IMGFILE=$1

if [ ! -n "$1" ]; then
  echo "Usage: $0 <file.img>"
  exit 1
fi

java -jar $KEYSTORE_TOOLS/BootSignature.jar /boot $IMGFILE $KEYSTORE_TOOLS/keystore.pk8 $KEYSTORE_TOOLS/keystore.x509.pem $IMGFILE.signed

Don’t forget to make that script executable! (chmod +x)

Now you can use the script to sign your images and then boot it

sign_img boot.img && fastboot boot boot.img.signed

Have fun!