Description
With the increasing use of cloud computing platforms, protecting applications and their data from the platform
provider gained importance.
Hardware-based trusted execution environments offer protection from the platform owner to application components and
entire virtual machines, providing the application with confidentiality and integrity to different extents.
One of these solutions is AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV).
Its newest iteration SEV Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) ensures the confidentiality and data integrity of a virtual
machine by encrypting and integrity-validating virtual memory and CPU state.
SEV-SNP also introduced a new attestation scheme, which is used to prove that the virtual machine is authentic and
executing in a protected environment.
This remote attestation alone however does not provide a secure means of communication.
In this paper, we design a protocol integrating the attestation capabilities of SEV-SNP with the Transport Layer
Security (TLS) 1.3 connection establishment.
The SEV-SNP attestation report is included directly in the TLS handshake using X.509 certificate extensions, meaning
that no extra authentication messages are required to establish trust in the virtual machine.
The TLS protocol itself remains unchanged, which preserves its security guarantees.
Finally, we provide a proof of concept implementation demonstrating the protocol.
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Thesis topic in co-operation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security AISEC, Garching