Re: [PATCH v3 0/9] Generalize memory encryption models

[Cornelia Huck <cohuck@redhat.com>]

On Mon, 22 Jun 2020 16:27:28 +0200
Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@de.ibm.com> wrote:

> On 19.06.20 04:05, David Gibson wrote:
> > A number of hardware platforms are implementing mechanisms whereby the
> > hypervisor does not have unfettered access to guest memory, in order
> > to mitigate the security impact of a compromised hypervisor.
> > 
> > AMD's SEV implements this with in-cpu memory encryption, and Intel has
> > its own memory encryption mechanism.  POWER has an upcoming mechanism
> > to accomplish this in a different way, using a new memory protection
> > level plus a small trusted ultravisor.  s390 also has a protected
> > execution environment.
> > 
> > The current code (committed or draft) for these features has each
> > platform's version configured entirely differently.  That doesn't seem
> > ideal for users, or particularly for management layers.
> > 
> > AMD SEV introduces a notionally generic machine option
> > "machine-encryption", but it doesn't actually cover any cases other
> > than SEV.
> > 
> > This series is a proposal to at least partially unify configuration
> > for these mechanisms, by renaming and generalizing AMD's
> > "memory-encryption" property.  It is replaced by a
> > "host-trust-limitation" property pointing to a platform specific
> > object which configures and manages the specific details.
> > 
> > For now this series covers just AMD SEV and POWER PEF.  I'm hoping it
> > can be extended to cover the Intel and s390 mechanisms as well,
> > though.  
> 
> Let me try to summarize what I understand what you try to achieve:
> one command line parameter for all platforms that 
> 
> common across all platforms:
> - disable KSM
> - by default enables iommu_platform
> 
> 
> per platform:
> - setup the necessary encryption scheme when appropriate
> - block migration
> -....
> 
> 
> The tricky part is certainly the per platform thing. For example on
> s390 we just have a cpumodel flag that provides interfaces to the guest
> to switch into protected mode via the ultravisor. This works perfectly
> fine with the host model, so no need to configure anything.  The platform
> code then disables KSM _on_switchover_ and not in general. Because the 
> guest CAN switch into protected, but it does not have to.
> 
> So this feels really hard to do right. Would a virtual BoF on KVM forum
> be too late? We had a BoF on protected guests last year and that was
> valuable.

Maybe we can do some kind of call to discuss this earlier? (Maybe in
the KVM call slot on Tuesdays?) I think it would be really helpful if
everybody would have at least a general understanding about how
encryption/protection works on the different architectures.