On 20/10/2021 15:11, Greg KH wrote: > On Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 08:00:28AM -0400, James Bottomley wrote: >> On Wed, 2021-10-20 at 08:39 +0200, Greg KH wrote: >>> On Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 06:14:06AM +0000, Dov Murik wrote: >> [...] >>>> + help >>>> + Copy memory reserved by EFI for Confidential Computing (coco) >>>> + injected secrets, if EFI exposes such a table entry. >>> >>> Why would you want to "copy" secret memory? >>> >>> This sounds really odd here, it sounds like you are opening up a >>> security hole. Are you sure this is the correct text that everyone >>> on the "COCO" group agrees with? >> >> The way this works is that EFI covers the secret area with a boot time >> handoff block, which means it gets destroyed as soon as >> ExitBootServices is called as a security measure ... if you do nothing >> the secret is shredded. This means you need to make a copy of it >> before that happens if there are secrets that need to live beyond the >> EFI boot stub. > > Ok, but "copy secrets" does sound really odd, so you all need a much > better description here, and hopefully somewhere else in Documentation/ > to describe exactly what this new API is and is to be used for. > So something like: config EFI_COCO_SECRET bool "Keep the EFI Confidential Computing secret area" depends on EFI help Confidential Computing platforms (such as AMD SEV) allow for secrets injection during guest VM launch. The secrets are placed in a designated EFI memory area. EFI destorys the confidential computing secret area when ExitBootServices is called. In order to use the secrets in the kernel, the secret area must be copied to kernel-reserved memory (before it is erased). If you say Y here, the EFI stub will copy the EFI secret area (if available) and reserve it for use inside the kernel. This will allow the virt/coco/efi_secret module to access the secrets. and some new file like Documentation/security/coco/efi_secret.rst which describes this whole protocol (from secret injection at VM launch into an EFI page, through efistub and efi in linux, to the efi_secret module which exposes the secrets). Is that what you're looking for? > Otherwise I read this as "hey a backdoor to read the secrets I wasn't > supposed to be able to see!" > Note that both EFI and kernel (and userspace, for that matter) are inside the trusted zone in terms of AMD SEV (host/hypervisor => untrusted, guest VM => trusted). So it's OK for the guest kernel to see these secrets. -Dov > thanks, > > greg k-h >
