[AnthonyMouse]

I still don't understand how this is ever supposed to work. Generally when someone finds a vulnerability, you take countermeasures or take the system offline until it can be patched (or apply the patch immediately).

With this, the party in control of the system is also in control of that, so every time a new vulnerability is found they can exploit it before patching it to retroactively get access to your data. Or never patch it at all and use the vulnerability itself to forge attestations that the vulnerability is patched.

[sliverstorm]

It might not make your guest truly impervious, but it certainly raises the bar for your bad actor host.

Depending on how determined you imagine your bad actor host, you can probably never get around things like "zero day is discovered, host disconnects guest from internet preventing you from patching zero day, exploits guest".

Or are you talking about vulnerabilities in SEV itself?

[AnthonyMouse]

Vulnerabilities in SEV itself.

In theory you can't actually do it at all. The key is inside the chip, the attacker has physical control over the chip, an attacker with enough resources is going to be able to extract the key. You have no hope against a state-level attacker or even many university research departments. The assumption seems to be that the attacker won't be that sophisticated.

The problem is there are also likely to be attacks which won't require significant resources once published. Researchers are always coming up with new ways to extract keys from "tamper proof hardware" using timing or power consumption or whatever else. Some future version of the hardware will protect against that specific attack but that's too late for all the secrets you trusted to the current version.