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Re: [RFC 0/4] Adding Virtual Memory Fuses to Xen



Hi Demi,

On 13/12/2022 22:22, Demi Marie Obenour wrote:
On Tue, Dec 13, 2022 at 08:55:28PM +0000, Julien Grall wrote:
On 13/12/2022 19:48, Smith, Jackson wrote:
Hi Xen Developers,

Hi Jackson,

Thanks for sharing the prototype with the community. Some questions/remarks
below.

[snip]

With this technique, we protect the integrity and confidentiality of
guest memory. However, a compromised hypervisor can still read/write
register state during traps, or refuse to schedule a guest, denying
service. We also recognize that because this technique precludes
modifying Xen's page tables after startup, it may not be compatible
with all of Xen's potential use cases. On the other hand, there are
some uses cases (in particular statically defined embedded systems)
where our technique could be adopted with minimal friction.

 From what you wrote, this sounds very much like the project Citrix and
Amazon worked on called "Secret-free hypervisor" with a twist. In your case,
you want to prevent the hypervisor to map/unmap the guest memory.

You can find some details in [1]. The code is x86 only, but I don't see any
major blocker to port it on arm64.

Is there any way the secret-free hypervisor code could be upstreamed?

I have posted a new version with also a PoC for arm64:

https://lore.kernel.org/xen-devel/20221216114853.8227-1-julien@xxxxxxx/T/#t

For convenience, I have also pushed a branch to my personal git:

https://xenbits.xen.org/gitweb/?p=people/julieng/xen-unstable.git;a=summary

branch no-directmap-v1

Cheers,

--
Julien Grall



 


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