Remote attestation of confidential VMs using ephemeral vTPMs

Abstract

Trying to address the security challenges of a cloud-centric software deployment paradigm, silicon and cloud vendors are introducing confidential computing – an umbrella term aimed at providing hardware and software mechanisms for protecting cloud workloads from the cloud provider and its software stack. Today, Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), AMD secure encrypted virtualization (SEV), Intel trust domain extensions (TDX), etc., provide a way to shield cloud applications from the cloud provider through encryption of the application’s memory below the hardware boundary of the CPU, hence requiring trust only in the CPU vendor. Unfortunately, existing hardware mechanisms do not automatically enable the guarantee that a protected system was not tampered with during configuration and boot time. Such a guarantee relies on a hardware root of trust, i.e., an integrity-protected location that can store measurements in a trustworthy manner, extend them, and authenticate the measurement logs to the user (remote attestation). In this work, we design and implement a virtual trusted platform module (vTPM) that virtualizes the hardware root of trust without requiring trust in the cloud provider. To ensure the security of a vTPM in a provider-controlled environment, we leverage unique isolation properties of the SEV-SNP hardware that allows us to execute secure services (such as vTPM) as part of the enclave environment protected from the cloud provider. We further develop a novel approach to vTPM state management where the vTPM state is not preserved across reboots. Specifically, we develop a stateless ephemeral vTPM that supports remote attestation without any persistent state on the host. This allows us to pair each confidential VM with a private instance of a vTPM completely isolated from the provider-controlled environment and other VMs. We built our prototype entirely on open-source components – Qemu, Linux, and Keylime. Though our work is AMD-specific, a similar approach could be used to build remote attestation protocols on other trusted execution environments (TEE).