USENIX ATC '24 and OSDI '24

Ziqiao Zhou, Microsoft Research; Anjali, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Weiteng Chen, Microsoft Research; Sishuai Gong, Purdue University; Chris Hawblitzel and Weidong Cui, Microsoft Research

Hardware vendors have introduced confidential VM architectures (e.g., AMD SEV-SNP, Intel TDX and Arm CCA) in recent years. They eliminate the trust in the hypervisor and lead to the need for security modules such as AMD Secure VMService Module (SVSM). These security modules aim to provide a guest with security features that previously were offered by the hypervisor. Since the security of such modules is critical, Rust is used to implement them for its known memory safety features. However, using Rust for implementation does not guarantee correctness, and the use of unsafe Rust compromises the memory safety guarantee.

In this paper, we introduce VERISMO, the first verified security module for confidential VMs on AMD SEV-SNP. VERISMO is fully functional and provides security features such as code integrity, runtime measurement, and secret management. More importantly, as a Rust-based implementation, VERISMO is fully verified for functional correctness, secure information flow, and VM confidentiality and integrity. The key challenge in verifying VERISMO is that the untrusted hypervisor can interrupt VERISMO's execution and modify the hardware state at any time. We address this challenge by dividing verification into two layers. The upper layer handles the concurrent hypervisor execution, while the lower layer handles VERISMO's own concurrent execution. When compared with a C-based implementation, VERISMO achieves similar performance. When verifying VERISMO, we identified a subtle requirement for VM confidentiality and found that it was overlooked by AMD SVSM. This demonstrates the necessity for formal verification.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/zhou