Towards Trust Proof for Secure Confidential Virtual Machines

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method to generate trust proof for AMD SEV-based confidential VMs using a secure vTPM, enhancing trustworthiness and security in virtualized environments.

Contribution

It proposes the T3CVM framework with a well-defined root-of-trust, secure vTPM, and trust chain construction, addressing weaknesses in existing trust proof approaches for CVMs.

Findings

Successfully constructs trust chains for CVMs.

Provides formal security analysis of T3CVM.

Prototype demonstrates practical performance.

Abstract

The Virtual Machine (VM)-based Trusted-Execution-Environment (TEE) technology, like AMD Secure-Encrypted-Virtualization (SEV), enables the establishment of Confidential VMs (CVMs) to protect data privacy. But CVM lacks ways to provide the trust proof of its running state, degrading the user confidence of using CVM. The technology of virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) can be used to generate trust proof for CVM. However, the existing vTPM-based approaches have the weaknesses like lack of a well-defined root-of-trust, lack of vTPM protection, and lack of vTPM's trust proof. These weaknesses prevent the generation of the trust proof of the CVM. This paper proposes an approach to generate the trust proof for AMD SEV-based CVM so as to ensure its security by using a secure vTPM to construct Trusted Complete Chain for the CVM (T3CVM). T3CVM consists of three components: 1) TR-Manager, as the well-defined root-of-trust, helps to build complete trust chains for CVMs; 2) CN-TPMCVM, a special CVM provides secure vTPMs; 3) CN-CDriver, an enhanced TPM driver. Our approach overcomes the weaknesses of existing approaches and enables trusted computing-based applications to run seamlessly in the trusted CVM. We perform a formal security analysis of T3CVM, and implement a prototype system to evaluate its performance.