Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] Allow access to confidential computing secret area

From: Dr. David Alan Gilbert
Date: Mon May 24 2021 - 08:08:24 EST


* Andi Kleen (ak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
>
> > The SEV-SNP attestation approach is very similar to what Andi described
> > for the TDX. However, in the case of legacy SEV and ES, the attestation
> > verification is performed before the guest is booted. In this case, the
> > hyervisor puts the secret provided by the guest owner (after the
> > attestation) at a fixed location. Dov's driver is simply reading that
> > fixed location and making it available through the simple text file.
>
> That's the same as our SVKL model.
>
> The (not yet posted) driver is here:
>
> https://github.com/intel/tdx/commit/62c2d9fae275d5bf50f869e8cfb71d2ca1f71363
>

Is there any way we could merge these two so that the TDX/SVKL would
look similar to SEV/ES to userspace? If we needed some initrd glue here
for luks it would be great if we could have one piece of glue.
[I'm not sure if the numbering/naming of the secrets, and their format
are defined in the same way]

> We opted to use ioctls, with the idea that it should be just read and
> cleared once to not let the secret lying around. Typically you would just
> use it to set up dmcrypt or similar once. I think read-and-clear with
> explicit operations is a better model than some virtual file because of the
> security properties.

Do you think the ioctl is preferable to read+ftruncate/unlink ?
And if it was an ioctl, again could we get some standardisation here -
i.e.
maybe a /dev/confguest with a CONF_COMP_GET_KEY etc ?

Dave

> -Andi
>
>
--
Dr. David Alan Gilbert / dgilbert@xxxxxxxxxx / Manchester, UK