Re: [PATCH 0/6] Intel Secure Guard Extensions

From: Jarkko Sakkinen
Date: Mon May 09 2016 - 01:38:36 EST


On Fri, May 06, 2016 at 01:54:14PM +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> On Fri, 6 May 2016, Jarkko Sakkinen wrote:
>
> > On Tue, May 03, 2016 at 04:06:27AM -0500, Dr. Greg Wettstein wrote:
> > > It would be helpful and instructive for anyone involved in this debate
> > > to review the following URL which details Intel's SGX licening
> > > program:
> > >
> > > https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-sgx-product-licensing
> >
> > I think it would be good to note that the licensing process is available
> > only for Windows. For Linux you can only use debug enclaves at the
> > moment. The default LE has "allow-all" policy for debug enclaves.
>
> Which makes the feature pretty useless.
>
> > > I think the only way forward to make all of this palatable is to
> > > embrace something similar to what has been done with Secure Boot. The
> > > Root Enclave Key will need to be something which can be reconfigured
> > > by the Platform Owner through BIOS/EFI. That model would take Intel
> > > off the hook from a security perspective and establish the notion of
> > > platform trust to be a bilateral relationship between a service
> > > provider and client.
> >
> > This concern has been raised many times now. Sadly this did not make
> > into Skyle but in future we will have one shot MSRs (can be set only
> > once per boot cycle) for defining your own root of trust.
>
> We'll wait for that to happen.

I fully understand if you (and others) want to keep this standpoint but
what if we could get it to staging after I've revised it with suggested
changes and internal changes in my TODO? Then it would not pollute the
mainline kernel but still would be easily available for experimentation.

There was one header out of staging tree in the patch set sgx.h that I
could place to the staging area in the next revision.

For the next revision I'll document how IA32_LEPUBKEYHASHx MSRs work
based on some concerns that Andy raised so that we can hopefully have a
better discussion about this feature.

> Thanks,
>
> tglx

/Jarkko