Re: [PATCH v2 00/15] vfio: expose virtual Shared Virtual Addressing to VMs

[Peter Xu]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 04:49:28PM +0100, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> Isolation between applications is preserved but there is no isolation
> between the device and the application itself. The application needs to
> trust the device.
> 
> Examples:
> 
> 1. The device can snoop secret data from readable pages in the
>    application's virtual memory space.
> 
> 2. The device can gain arbitrary execution on the CPU by overwriting
>    control flow addresses (e.g. function pointers, stack return
>    addresses) in writable pages.

To me, SVA seems to be that "middle layer" of secure where it's not as safe as
VFIO_IOMMU_MAP_DMA which has buffer level granularity of control (but of course
we pay overhead on buffer setups and on-the-fly translations), however it's far
better than DMA with no IOMMU which can ruin the whole host/guest, because
after all we do a lot of isolations as process based.

IMHO it's the same as when we see a VM (or the QEMU process) as a whole along
with the guest code.  In some cases we don't care if the guest did some bad
things to mess up with its own QEMU process.  It is still ideal if we can even
stop the guest from doing so, but when it's not easy to do it the ideal way, we
just lower the requirement to not spread the influence to the host and other
VMs.

Thanks,

-- 
Peter Xu