linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] docs: security: Confidential computing intro and threat model

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Date:   Thu, 27 Apr 2023 13:19:52 -0400
From:   "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@...hat.com>
To:     James Bottomley <jejb@...ux.ibm.com>
Cc:     "Reshetova, Elena" <elena.reshetova@...el.com>,
        "Christopherson, , Sean" <seanjc@...gle.com>,
        Carlos Bilbao <carlos.bilbao@....com>,
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        Rajnesh Kanwal <rkanwal@...osinc.com>,
        Dylan Reid <dylan@...osinc.com>,
        Ravi Sahita <ravi@...osinc.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] docs: security: Confidential computing intro and threat
 model

On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 09:18:08AM -0400, James Bottomley wrote:
> I think the problem is that the tenor of the document is that the CSP
> should be seen as the enemy of the tenant. Whereas all CSP's want to be
> seen as the partner of the tenant (admittedly so they can upsell
> services). In particular, even if you adopt (b) there are several
> reasons why you'd use confidential computing:
> 
>    1. Protection from other tenants who break containment in the cloud.
>       These tenants could exfiltrate data from Non-CoCo VMs, but likely
>       would be detected before they had time to launch an attack using
>       vulnerabilities in the current linux device drivers.
>    2. Legal data security.  There's a lot of value in a CSP being able
>       to make the legal statement that it does not have access to a
>       customer data because of CoCo.
>    3. Insider threats (bribe a CSP admin employee).  This one might get
>       as far as trying to launch an attack on a CoCo VM, but having
>       checks at the CSP to detect and defeat this would work instead of
>       every insider threat having to be defeated inside the VM.

And generally, all these are instances of adopting a zero trust
architecture, right? Many CSPs have no need to access VM memory
so they would rather not have the ability.

-- 
MST