Re: Linux guest kernel threat model for Confidential Computing

Daniel P. Berrangé
2023-01-26T15:55:42Z

On Thu, Jan 26, 2023 at 04:13:11PM +0100, Richard Weinberger wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 26, 2023 at 3:58 PM Dr. David Alan Gilbert
> <dgilbert@redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > * Richard Weinberger (richard.weinberger@gmail.com) wrote:
> > > On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 3:22 PM Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
> > > > Any virtual device exposed to the guest that can transfer potentially
> > > > sensitive data needs to have some form of guest controlled encryption
> > > > applied. For disks this is easy with FDE like LUKS, for NICs this is
> > > > already best practice for services by using TLS. Other devices may not
> > > > have good existing options for applying encryption.
> > >
> > > I disagree wrt. LUKS. The cryptography behind LUKS protects persistent data
> > > but not transport. If an attacker can observe all IO you better
> > > consult a cryptographer.
> > > LUKS has no concept of session keys or such, so the same disk sector will
> > > always get encrypted with the very same key/iv.
> >
> > Are you aware of anything that you'd use instead?
>
> Well, I'd think towards iSCSI over TLS to protect the IO transport.

That just moves the problem elsewhere though surely. The remote iSCSI
server still has to persist the VMs' data, and the cloud sevice provider
can observe any I/O before it hits the final hardware storage. So the
remote iSCSI server needs to apply a FDE like encryption scheme for
the exported iSCSI block device, and using a key only accessible to the
tenant that owns the VM. It still needs to solve the same problem of
having some kind of "generation ID" that can tweak the IV for each virtual
disk sector, to protect against time based analysis.

With regards,
Daniel
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