Re: SEV guest attestation

[Dov Murik <dovmurik@linux.ibm.com>]

On 25/11/2021 15:52, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 25, 2021 at 08:14:28AM +0100, Sergio Lopez wrote:
>> For SEV-SNP, this is pretty much the end of the story, because the
>> attestation exchange is driven by an agent inside the guest. Well,
>> there's also the need to have in the VM a well-known vNIC bridged to a
>> network that's routed to the Attestation Server, that everyone seems
>> to consider a given, but to me, from a CSP perspective, looks like
>> quite a headache. In fact, I'd go as far as to suggest this
>> communication should happen through an alternative channel, such as
>> vsock, having a proxy on the Host, but I guess that depends on the CSP
>> infrastructure.
> 
> Allowing network connections from inside the VM, to any kind
> of host side mgmt LAN services is a big no for some cloud hosts.
> 
> They usually desire for any guest network connectivity to be
> associated with a VLAN/network segment that is strictly isolated
> from any host mgmt LAN.
> 
> OpenStack provides a virtual CCDROM for injecting cloud-init
> metadata as an alternative to the network based metadata REST
> service, since they latter often isn't deployed.
> 
> Similarly for virtual filesystems, we've designed virtiofs,
> rather than relying on a 2nd NIC combined with NFS.
> 
> We cannot assume availability of a real network device for the
> attestation. If one does exist fine, but there needs to be an
> alternative option that can be used.
> 
> 
> On a slightly different topic - if the attestation is driven
> from an agent inside the guest, this seems to imply we let the
> guest vCPUs start beforre attestation is done. Contrary to
> the SEV/SEV-ES where we seem to be wanting vCPUs to remain
> in the stopped state until attestation is complete & secrets
> provided.  If the vCPUs are started, is there some mechanism
> to restrict what can be done  before attestation is complete?

The only mechanism is to design the workload in the Guest in a way that
it can't do anything meaningful until the secret is injected, and the
Attestation Server will release the secret only if a proper attestation
report is presented.

James (cc'd) wants to move this attestation check as early as possible
--> "to restrict what can be done before attestation is complete".


-Dov