Date:   Tue, 8 Aug 2023 07:54:16 -0700
From:   Sathyanarayanan Kuppuswamy 
        <sathyanarayanan.kuppuswamy@...ux.intel.com>
To:     James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@...senPartnership.com>,
        Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@...el.com>, dhowells@...hat.com
Cc:     Brijesh Singh <brijesh.singh@....com>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
        Tom Lendacky <thomas.lendacky@....com>,
        Dionna Amalie Glaze <dionnaglaze@...gle.com>,
        Borislav Petkov <bp@...en8.de>,
        Jarkko Sakkinen <jarkko@...nel.org>,
        Samuel Ortiz <sameo@...osinc.com>,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        linux-coco@...ts.linux.dev, keyrings@...r.kernel.org,
        x86@...nel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/4] keys: Introduce a keys frontend for attestation
 reports



On 8/8/23 7:19 AM, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Mon, 2023-08-07 at 16:33 -0700, Dan Williams wrote:
>> James Bottomley wrote:
>>> On Fri, 2023-08-04 at 19:37 -0700, Dan Williams wrote:
>>>> James Bottomley wrote:
>>>> [..]
>>>>>> This report interface on the other hand just needs a single
>>>>>> ABI to retrieve all these vendor formats (until industry
>>>>>> standardization steps in) and it needs to be flexible (within
>>>>>> reason) for all the TSM-specific options to be conveyed. I do
>>>>>> not trust my ioctl ABI minefield avoidance skills to get that
>>>>>> right. Key blob instantiation feels up to the task.
>>>>>
>>>>> To repeat: there's nothing keylike about it.
>>>>
>>>> From that perspective there's nothing keylike about user-keys
>>>> either.
>>>
>>> Whataboutism may be popular in politics at the moment, but it
>>> shouldn't be a justification for API abuse: Just because you might
>>> be able to argue something else is an abuse of an API doesn't give
>>> you the right to abuse it further.
>>
>> That appears to be the disagreement, that the "user" key type is an
>> abuse of the keyctl subsystem. Is that the general consensus that it
>> was added as a mistake that is not be repeated?
> 
> I didn't say anything about your assertion, just that you seemed to be
> trying to argue it.  However, if you look at the properties of keys:
> 
> https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.0/security/keys/core.html
> 
> You'll see that none of them really applies to the case you're trying
> to add.
> 
>> Otherwise there is significant amount of thought that has gone into
>> keyctl including quotas, permissions, and instantiation flows.
>>
>>
>>>> Those are just blobs that userspace gets to define how they are
>>>> used and the keyring is just a transport. I also think that this
>>>> interface *is* key-like in that it is used in the flow of
>>>> requesting other key material. The ability to set policy on who
>>>> can request and instantiate these pre-requisite reports can be
>>>> controlled by request-key policy.
>>>
>>> I thought we agreed back here:
>>>
>>> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-coco/64c5ed6eb4ca1_a88b2942a@dwillia2-xfh.jf.intel.com.notmuch/
>>>
>>> That it ended up as "just a transport interface".  Has something
>>> changed that?
>>
>> This feedback cast doubt on the assumption that attestation reports
>> are infrequently generated:
>>
>> http://lore.kernel.org/r/CAAH4kHbsFbzL=0gn71qq1-1kL398jiS2rd3as1qUFnLTCB5mHQ@mail.gmail.com
> 
> Well, I just read attestation would be called more than once at boot. 
> That doesn't necessarily require a concurrent interface.
> 

Agree. Currently, both sev-guest and tdx-guest (Quote generation part) IOCTL
drivers use a mutex to serialize the cmd requests. By design, TDX GET_QUOTE
hypercall also does not support concurrent requests. Since the attestation
request is expected to be less frequent and not time-critical, I  don't see a
need to support concurrent interfaces.

>> Now, the kernel is within its rights to weigh in on that question
>> with an ABI that is awkward for that use case, or it can decide up
>> front that sysfs is not built for transactions.
> 
> I thought pretty much everyone agreed sysfs isn't really transactional.
> However, if the frequency of use of this is low enough, CC attestation
> doesn't need to be transactional either.  All you need is the ability
> to look at the inputs and outputs and to specify new ones if required.
> Sysfs works for this provided two entities don't want to supply inputs
> at the same time.
> 
>>> [...]
>>>>> Sneaking it in as a one-off is the wrong way to proceed
>>>>> on something like this.
>>>>
>>>> Where is the sneaking in cc'ing all the relevant maintainers of
>>>> the keyring subsystem and their mailing list? Yes, please add
>>>> others to the cc. 
>>>
>>> I was thinking more using the term pubkey in the text about
>>> something that is more like a nonce:
>>>
>>> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-coco/169057265801.180586.10867293237672839356.stgit@dwillia2-xfh.jf.intel.com/
>>>
>>> That looked to me designed to convince the casual observer that
>>> keys were involved.
>>
>> Ok, I see where you were going, at the same time I was trusting
>> keyrings@ community to ask about that detail and was unaware of any
>> advocacy against new key types.
> 
> I'm not advocating against new key types.  I'm saying what you're
> proposing is simply a data transport layer and, as such, has no
> properties that really make it a key type.
> 
>>>> The question for me at this point is whether a new:
>>>>
>>>>         /dev/tsmX
>>>>
>>>> ...ABI is worth inventing, or if a key-type is sufficient. To
>>>> Peter's concern, this key-type imposes no restrictions over what
>>>> sevguest already allows. New options are easy to add to the key
>>>> instantiation interface and I expect different vendors are likely
>>>> to develop workalike functionality to keep option proliferation
>>>> to a minimum. Unlike ioctl() there does not need to be as careful
>>>> planning about the binary format of the input payload for per
>>>> vendor options. Just add more tokens to the instantiation
>>>> command-line.
>>>
>>> I still think this is pretty much an arbitrary transport interface.
>>> The question of how frequently it is used and how transactional it
>>> has to be depend on the use cases (which I think would bear further
>>> examination).  What you mostly want to do is create a transaction
>>> by adding parameters individually, kick it off and then read a set
>>> of results back.  Because the format of the inputs and outputs is
>>> highly specific to the architecture, the kernel shouldn't really be
>>> doing any inspection or modification.  For low volume single
>>> threaded use, this can easily be done by sysfs.  For high volume
>>> multi-threaded use, something like configfs or a generic keyctl
>>> like object transport interface would be more appropriate. 
>>> However, if you think the latter, it should still be proposed as a
>>> new generic kernel to userspace transactional transport mechanism.
>>
>> Perhaps we can get more detail about the proposed high-volume use
>> case: Dionna, Peter?
> 
> Well, that's why I asked for use cases.  I have one which is very low
> volume and single threaded.  I'm not sure what use case you have since
> you never outlined it and I see hints from Red Hat that they worry
> about concurrency.  So it's interface design 101: collect the use cases
> first.
> 
>> I think the minimum bar for ABI success here is that options are not
>> added without touching a common file that everyone can agree what the
>> option is, no more drivers/virt/coco/$vendor ABI isolation. If
>> concepts like VMPL and RTMR are going to have cross-vendor workalike
>> functionality one day then the kernel community picks one name for
>> shared concepts. The other criteria for success is that the frontend
>> needs no change when standardization arrives, assuming all vendors
>> get their optionality into that spec definition.
> 
> I don't think RTMR would ever be cross vendor.  It's sort of a cut down
> TPM with a limited number of PCRs.  Even Intel seems to be admitting
> this when they justified putting a vTPM into TDX at the OC3 Q and A
> session (no tools currently work with RTMRs and the TPM ecosystem is
> fairly solid, so using a vTPM instead of RTMRs gives us an industry
> standard workflow).
> 
> James
> 
> 
>> keyring lessened my workload with how it can accept ascii token
>> options whereas ioctl() needs more upfront thought.
> 
> 

-- 
Sathyanarayanan Kuppuswamy
Linux Kernel Developer

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