Re: [PATCH v2 4/6] virtio: Initialize authorized attribute for confidential guest

[Dan Williams]

On Sat, Oct 2, 2021 at 7:20 AM Andi Kleen <ak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> On 10/2/2021 4:14 AM, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > On Sat, Oct 02, 2021 at 07:04:28AM -0400, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> >> On Fri, Oct 01, 2021 at 08:49:28AM -0700, Andi Kleen wrote:
> >>>>    Do you have a list of specific drivers and kernel options that you
> >>>> feel you now "trust"?
> >>> For TDX it's currently only virtio net/block/console
> >>>
> >>> But we expect this list to grow slightly over time, but not at a high rate
> >>> (so hopefully <10)
> >> Well there are already >10 virtio drivers and I think it's reasonable
> >> that all of these will be used with encrypted guests. The list will
> >> grow.
> > What is keeping "all" drivers from being on this list?
>
> It would be too much work to harden them all, and it would be pointless
> because all these drivers are never legitimately needed in a virtualized
> environment which only virtualize a very small number of devices.
>
> >   How exactly are
> > you determining what should, and should not, be allowed?
>
> Everything that has had reasonable effort at hardening can be added. But
> if someone proposes to add a driver that should trigger additional
> scrutiny in code review. We should also request them to do some fuzzing.
>
> It's a bit similar to someone trying to add a new syscall interface.
> That also triggers much additional scrutiny for good reasons and people
> start fuzzing it.
>
>
> >    How can
> > drivers move on, or off, of it over time?
>
> Adding something is submitting a patch to the allow list.
>
> I'm not sure the "off" case would happen, unless the driver is
> completely removed, or maybe it has some unfixable security problem. But
> that is all rather unlikely.
>
>
> >
> > And why not just put all of that into userspace and have it pick and
> > choose?  That should be the end-goal here, you don't want to encode
> > policy like this in the kernel, right?
>
> How would user space know what drivers have been hardened? This is
> really something that the kernel needs to determine. I don't think we
> can outsource it to anyone else.

How it is outsourcing by moving that same allow list over the kernel /
user boundary. It can be maintained by the same engineers and get
deployed by something like:

dracut --authorize-device-list=confidential-computing-default $kernel-version

With that distributions can deploy kernel-specific authorizations and
admins can deploy site-specific authorizations. Then the kernel
implementation is minimized to authorize just enough drivers by
default to let userspace take over the policy.

> Also BTW of course user space can still override it, but really the
> defaults should be a kernel policy.

The default is secure, trust nothing but bootstrap devices.

> There's also the additional problem that one of the goals of
> confidential guest is to just move existing guest virtual images into
> them without much changes. So it's better for such a case if as much as
> possible of the policy is in the kernel. But that's more a secondary
> consideration, the first point is really the important part.

The same image can be used on host and guest in this "do it in
userspace" proposal.