fs-verity is a Linux kernel filesystem feature, merged in kernel 5.4, that provides read-only, content-addressable integrity verification at the individual file level. When fs-verity is enabled on a file (via the FS_IOC_ENABLE_VERITY ioctl), the kernel builds a Merkle tree of the file’s content blocks and stores it in a filesystem-specific location (in an ext4 or f2fs Merkle tree block range, or in a separate xattr-adjacent structure on btrfs). From that point, the file becomes immutable — writes are rejected — and every page read from the file is verified against the Merkle tree before being returned to userspace. The file’s fs-verity digest is the SHA-256 (or SHA-512) root hash of the Merkle tree, computable without reading the file at all once the tree is built: fsverity digest file returns this digest. A file’s fs-verity digest is a stable, content-derived identity: two files with the same content have the same digest, and any byte-level modification produces a different digest that verification will detect and reject with EIO. The kernel caches verified Merkle tree nodes in the page cache alongside file data, so the amortised verification overhead is low for sequentially-read files.
dm-verity is a Linux device mapper target, available since kernel 3.4, that provides transparent read-only integrity verification for block devices. When a block device is mapped through dm-verity, every data block read from the underlying device is verified against a pre-computed Merkle tree of cryptographic hashes before being returned to the caller — any modification to any block, whether from corruption, bit rot, or deliberate tampering, produces a hash mismatch that dm-verity detects and handles according to its configured error mode. The verification is transparent to the filesystem and applications mounted above it: they read from the dm-verity device as if it were a normal block device, with no awareness that every read is being hash-checked. The security guarantee is that the integrity of the entire block device is committed to by a single root hash — a 32-byte SHA-256 value that covers the entire Merkle tree and therefore the entire data volume. If the root hash is known to be correct (because it was measured into a TPM PCR, embedded in a UKI, or signed by a Secure Boot key), then any verified read from the dm-verity device is guaranteed to return exactly the data that was present when the Merkle tree was computed.
