RE: [PATCH v3 0/3] TDX Guest Quote generation support

[Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>]

Dan Williams wrote:
> Kuppuswamy Sathyanarayanan wrote:
> > Hi All,
> > 
> > In TDX guest, the attestation process is used to verify the TDX guest
> > trustworthiness to other entities before provisioning secrets to the
> > guest.
> > 
> > The TDX guest attestation process consists of two steps:
> > 
> > 1. TDREPORT generation
> > 2. Quote generation.
> > 
> > The First step (TDREPORT generation) involves getting the TDX guest
> > measurement data in the format of TDREPORT which is further used to
> > validate the authenticity of the TDX guest. The second step involves
> > sending the TDREPORT to a Quoting Enclave (QE) server to generate a
> > remotely verifiable Quote. TDREPORT by design can only be verified on
> > the local platform. To support remote verification of the TDREPORT,
> > TDX leverages Intel SGX Quoting Enclave to verify the TDREPORT
> > locally and convert it to a remotely verifiable Quote. Although
> > attestation software can use communication methods like TCP/IP or
> > vsock to send the TDREPORT to QE, not all platforms support these
> > communication models. So TDX GHCI specification [1] defines a method
> > for Quote generation via hypercalls. Please check the discussion from
> > Google [2] and Alibaba [3] which clarifies the need for hypercall based
> > Quote generation support. This patch set adds this support.
> > 
> > Support for TDREPORT generation already exists in the TDX guest driver. 
> > This patchset extends the same driver to add the Quote generation
> > support.
> 
> I missed that the TDREPORT ioctl() and this character device are already
> upstream. The TDREPORT ioctl() if it is only needed for quote generation
> seems a waste because it just retrieves a blob that needs to be turned
> around and injected back into the kernel to generate a quote.
> 
> An ABI wants to care about the abstractions around what the hardware
> mechanism enables. The TD quote is not even at the end of that chain of
> what the ABI needs to offer. The guest wants to use the TD quote to access
> / unlock other resources, just like the SEV report is used to
> "...provide the VM with secrets, such as a disk decryption key, or other
> keys required for operation".
> 
> That's where the ABI line needs to be drawn. I.e. for the guest to be
> able to request the distributions of keys to unlock resources by a
> key-type and key-descriptor. Enable userspace to interrogate an
> attestation object without blobs needing to traverse the kernel. If the
> remote service needs more than just a blob and signature to validate the
> state of the guest then provide faclity to interrogate that property of
> quote / report in a common way versus the ABI risk of conveying vendor
> specific binary data formats in the kernel ABI.

A proposal for how this space moves forward:

1/ Stop accepting new arch specific ioctls in this space and revert the
   Intel TDREPORT ioctl if its only reason for existing is "quote"
   generation.

2/ Define a container format / envelope for platform-provided
   attestation evidence.

   The observation here is that although it is too late to unify the
   evidence formats across vendors, they appear to share the common form of
   a blob with an ECDSA signature. That reduces the minimum viable
   attestation service to something that can generically verify an
   evidence-blob signature.

3/ Define a key-description format that considers a superset of the
   platform needs. For example a 'privelege-level' concept can map to
   'vmpl' on AMD, but be ignored for now for Intel.

4/ For in progress enabling concepts like runtime measurement registers,
   look to reuse / abstract that behind the Keys subsystem existing support
   for managing TPM PCRs.

5/ Deprecate the multiple arch specific attestation ioctl interfaces in
   favor of this unified conveyance method.