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Attesting AMD SEV-SNP Virtual Machines with SPIRE

Published: 17 October 2023 Publication History

Abstract

SPIRE is an open-source project that enables the provisioning of verifiable identities to software components based on an attestation of the software properties, avoiding the leakage risks of pre-provisioned secrets. This paper presents an implementation of a SPIRE plugin that enables the attestation of AMD SEV-SNP confidential virtual machines. Our approach leverages the pluggable architecture from SPIRE and depends only on minor changes to QEMU, changes taken from its open-source community, and that should soon be merged. As a result, application providers can now use SPIRE to restrict sensitive credentials to be available only to services in environments protected from malicious hosts and cloud operators using AMD SEV-SNP technology. Our experiments show that the steps needed to create and attest the confidential VM do not prohibitively increase boot times (from 10.8 to 20.9 seconds) and that confidential VMs with encrypted disks only slightly degrade the CPU and RAM performance (about ) of unmodified applications.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Interoperable node integrity verification for confidential machines based on AMD SEV-SNPJournal of Internet Services and Applications10.5753/jisa.2024.390515:1(179-193)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Multi-Platform and Vault-Free Attestation of Confidential VMsProceedings of the 13th Latin-American Symposium on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1145/3697090.3698036(241-251)Online publication date: 26-Nov-2024
  • (2024)IT-SPIRE: Improving the Resilience of the SPIFFE/SPIRE Architecture with an Intrusion-Tolerant ServerProceedings of the 13th Latin-American Symposium on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1145/3697090.3697108(252-261)Online publication date: 26-Nov-2024
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Other conferences
LADC '23: Proceedings of the 12th Latin-American Symposium on Dependable and Secure Computing
October 2023
242 pages
ISBN:9798400708442
DOI:10.1145/3615366
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 17 October 2023

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Author Tags

  1. AMD SEV-SNP
  2. SPIRE
  3. confidential computing

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  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

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  • HPE and EMBRAPII

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LADC 2023

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Interoperable node integrity verification for confidential machines based on AMD SEV-SNPJournal of Internet Services and Applications10.5753/jisa.2024.390515:1(179-193)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Multi-Platform and Vault-Free Attestation of Confidential VMsProceedings of the 13th Latin-American Symposium on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1145/3697090.3698036(241-251)Online publication date: 26-Nov-2024
  • (2024)IT-SPIRE: Improving the Resilience of the SPIFFE/SPIRE Architecture with an Intrusion-Tolerant ServerProceedings of the 13th Latin-American Symposium on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1145/3697090.3697108(252-261)Online publication date: 26-Nov-2024
  • (2024)SNPGuard: Remote Attestation of SEV-SNP VMs Using Open Source Tools2024 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW)10.1109/EuroSPW61312.2024.00026(193-198)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2023)Trustworthy confidential virtual machines for the massesProceedings of the 24th International Middleware Conference10.1145/3590140.3629124(316-328)Online publication date: 27-Nov-2023

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