[e12e]

> our approach does give you assurance that someone with physical access can't easily snapshot your VM memory.

But how do you know the VM (or rather the hypervisor for the vm) is running on physical hardware, and not in a hypervisor?

I can't think of a way you could be certain of this remotely? Perhaps you could be on-site for the boot-up, and then rely on the fact that snapshotting is very hard -- but it sounds rather fragile...

Still very interesting project! I've been thinking a bit on "running inside the L/1/2/3 chache"-lately - but I hadn't thought about the particular idea that you could treat RAM as "external" -- assuming you could guarantee that you're always in cache.

[sweis]

You must first remotely attest the hypervisor using TXT before deploying a VM to run on it.

Today, that attestation process relies on a TPM and a signed certificate chain baked in by the TPM manufacturer. This is standard stuff out of the Trusted Computing Group.

One more thing to add, this isn't just a personal side project. We're a company and have a beta product deployed to early adopters.

[e12e]

I realized that you probably did have a product -- unfortunately that doesn't mean that the product works (not trying to imply anything about your product/company here; it's just (as you probably know) there many companies selling security solutions; and very few that seem to be selling security solutions that work...).

Are you aware of:

  "Overcoming TPM by exploiting EFI overflow"
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bM3Gut1hIk&feature=player_detailpage&t=1655

and:

  "Coreboot/bios malware":
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umBruM-wFUw&feature=player_detailpage&t=2297
  

It's an interesting use of TPM -- and sounds like a sound approach, assuming there aren't any bugs in the TPM software... which might be too big an assumption.

I don't suppose any of your software is available as open source? Where can I/we learn more?

[sweis]

Hi. We're aware of TPM vulnerabilities. The one you link to is not relevant. However, there are attacks to extract EK private keys, which we know the cost of conducting. It's significantly higher than other low-cost attacks.

We're also aware of vulnerabilities on the the LPC bus. The latter can be addressed with existing TPM 1.2 features -- although they aren't enabled by default.

There are CPU features in the pipeline which may make the TPM unnecessary. We're also working on some new attestation techniques which may help.

We measure and attest the state of the system with TXT. If that works as advertised, you would measure changes to the BIOS, SINIT, opt ROMs, ACM modules, etc.

[tptacek]

I don't know anything about his product but let me just chime in here to say that Steve Weis is the real deal.