Re: [Qemu-devel] blobstore disk format (was Re: Design of the blobstore)

[Stefan Berger <stefanb@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

On 09/22/2011 02:37 AM, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 09:44:37PM -0400, Stefan Berger wrote:
>> On 09/19/2011 03:04 PM, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
>>> On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 12:22:02PM -0400, Stefan Berger wrote:
>>>> On 09/17/2011 03:28 PM, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
>>>>> On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 12:46:40PM -0400, Stefan Berger wrote:
>>>> The checksuming I think makes sense if encryption is being added so
>>>> decryption and testing for proper key material remains an NVRAM
>>>> operation rather than a device operation.
>>> Not sure how this addresses the question of what to do
>>> on checksum failure.
>>>
>> Checksum failure on an unencrypted blob would mean that the blob is
>> corrupted. In case of encryption 'corrupted' would overlap with a
>> 'badly decrypted' blob. In either way the startup of the device
>> cannot happen.
> With corruption - why not? A specific block being corrupted does not mean all
> data is lost.
>
Presumably if you feed bad data into a device it either has its own way 
of integrity checking the blob (we actually do this for the TPM) or it 
will blow up/show wrong behavior at some point - hopefully sooner rather 
than later. Though the detection of bad data *can* be an NVRAM operation 
rather than the operation of a device using the data stored in the NVRAM.
>> We could refuse the NVRAM key suggesting that likely
>> this is the wrong key for decryption but corruption is also
>> possible.
> I'm guessing that if we find a correct ber structure in the file, this
> most likely means the key is correct.
[I still would add at least a CRC32 (or maybe even a SHA1) for detection 
of corruption of the ASN.1 encoded blob without having to hunt the data 
through a ASN.1 decoder.]

If we now say that data should be encryptable even if QCoW2 wasn't used, 
then is a command line option

-nvram id=<driveid>,key=<hex key>,...

something we should support to make the key applicable to the whole NVRAM?

      Stefan