Vitaly Kuznetsov
Vitaly works at Red Hat Virtualization Engineering team making sure Linux guests are first class citizen on various hypervisors and public clouds. He also contributes to KVM/QEMU stack and is part of KVM maintainers team in the Linux kernel.
Session
Confidential VM (CVM) instance types are becoming ubiquitous, with all major cloud providers offering them as a key component for achieving “zero trust.” While complete zero trust is currently more of a marketing term than a technical reality, we can acknowledge that CVM technologies help reduce the Trusted Computing Base (TCB) when utilized properly. But do we actually know how to use them effectively?
When transitioning from a world of traditional, mutable operating systems, users often expect to gain security benefits simply by moving their existing workloads to new CVM instance types, perhaps with some level of attestation. Unfortunately, in many cases, this looks more like a role play in a “security theater”.
Over the past few years, we have investigated what security benefits can truly be unlocked when mutable RHEL or Fedora workloads are deployed on confidential VMs, whether in the public cloud or on-premises. While immutable OSes offer distinct advantages in such scenarios, we pose the question: can traditional (mutable) OSes also benefit? Over the last year, we have contributed several features to systemd (and other components) that we believe can improve the situation. In particular, we are focused on preventing certain attack scenarios against a VM which is normally deployed from a publicly available cloud (marketplace) image. We have further ideas, and in this talk, we will share our vision for how these pieces can fit together.