Re: [PATCH v18 20/21] Documentation: add ipe documentation

Paul Moore
2024-05-14T19:50:21Z

On Sat, May 4, 2024 at 4:13 PM Fan Wu <wufan@linux.microsoft.com> wrote:
> On 5/4/2024 1:04 AM, Bagas Sanjaya wrote:
> > On Fri, May 03, 2024 at 03:32:30PM -0700, Fan Wu wrote:
> >> +IPE does not mitigate threats arising from malicious but authorized
> >> +developers (with access to a signing certificate), or compromised
> >> +developer tools used by them (i.e. return-oriented programming attacks).
> >> +Additionally, IPE draws hard security boundary between userspace and
> >> +kernelspace. As a result, IPE does not provide any protections against a
> >> +kernel level exploit, and a kernel-level exploit can disable or tamper
> >> +with IPE's protections.
> >
> > So how to mitigate kernel-level exploits then?
>
> One possible way is to use hypervisor to protect the kernel integrity.
> https://github.com/heki-linux is one project on this direction. Perhaps
> I should also add this link to the doc.

I wouldn't spend a lot of time on kernel exploits in the IPE
documentation as it is out of scope for IPE. In face, I would say
just that in the last sentence in the paragraph above:

"As a result, kernel-level exploits are considered outside the scope
of IPE and mitigation is left to other mechanisms."

(or something similar)

--
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