Re: privileged entropy sources in QEMU/KVM guests

["Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Thu, Nov 07, 2019 at 12:37:11PM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> On 07/11/19 11:25, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> >> This looks problematic on QEMU. Entropy is a valuable resource, and
> >> whatever resource SMM drivers depend on, should not be possible for e.g.
> >> a 3rd party UEFI driver (or even for the runtime OS) to exhaust.
> >> Therefore, it's not *only* the case that SMM drivers must not consume
> >> EFI_RNG_PROTOCOL (which exists at a less critical privilege level, i.e.
> >> outside of SMM/SMRAM), but also that SMM drivers must not depend on the
> >> same piece of *hardware* that feeds EFI_RNG_PROTOCOL.
> >>
> > The typical model is to seed a DRBG [deterministic pseudorandom
> > sequence generator] using a sufficient amount of high quality entropy.
> > Once you have done that, it is rather hard to exhaust a DRBG - it is a
> > mathematical construction that is designed to last for a long time (<=
> > 2^48 invocations [not bytes] according to the NIST spec), after which
> > it does not degrade although it may have generated so much output that
> > its internal state may be inferred if you have captured enough of it
> > (which is a rather theoretical issue IMHO)
> > 
> > The problem is that using the output of a DRBG as a seed is
> > non-trivial - the spec describes ways to do this, but wiring
> > virtio-rng to a DRBG in the host and using its output to seed a DRBG
> > in the guest is slighly problematic.
> > 
> > So it seems to me that the correct way to model this is to make the
> > host's true entropy source a shared resource like any other.
> > 
> 
> Yes, I would make SMM use a cryptographic pseudo-random number generator 
> and seed it from virtio-rng from DXE, way before the OS starts and can 
> "attack" it.
> 
> Once you've gotten a seed, you can create a CSPRNG with a stream cipher 
> such as ChaCha20, which is literally 30 lines of code.

If all we need is a one-time seed then virtio-rng is possibly overkill as
that provides a continuous stream. Instead could QEMU read a few bytes
from the host's /dev/urandom and pass it to EDK via fw_cfg, which can
use it for the CSPRNG seed. EDK would have to erase the fw_cfg field
to prevent the seed value leaking to the guest OS, but other than that
its quite straightforward.

Regards,
Daniel
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