Re: Linux guest kernel threat model for Confidential Computing

Jörg Rödel
2023-01-27T09:02:52Z

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:
> > Are you aware of anything that you'd use instead?
>
> Well, I'd think towards iSCSI over TLS to protect the IO transport.

In the context of confidential computing this makes only sense if the
scsi target is part of the trusted base, which means it needs to be
attested and protected against outside attacks. Currently all CoCo
implementations I know of treat disk storage as untrusted.

Besides that the same problems exist with a VMs encrypted memory. The
hardware does not guarantee that the HV can not fiddle with your private
memory, it only guarantees that you can detect such fiddling and that
the private data is encrypted. The HV can also still trace memory access
patterns of confidential guests by setting the right permissions in the
nested page table.

So storage and memory of a CoCo VM have in common that the transport is
not secure, but there are measures to detect if someone fiddles with
your data on the transport or at rest, for memory implemented in
hardware, and for storage in software by using dm-crypt together with
dm-verity or dm-integrity.

Regards,

Joerg