This PoC will allow you to start a Confidential VM on AMD SEV-SNP.

We will create an encrypted rootfs and boot a VM using QEMU and SVSM in VMPL0. SVSM will request an attestation report and talk to a Key Broker Server (using a proxy running in the host) to perform a remote attestation and receive the rootfs encryption key previously registered with the expected launch measurement.

At this point SVSM injects this secret into the guest OS leveraging the EFI configuration table under the LINUX_EFI_COCO_SECRET_AREA_GUID entry (adf956ad-e98c-484c-ae11-b51c7d336447) and the Linux's efi_secret kernel module. This was previously developed for AMD SEV and SEV-ES, where the table injection was from the hypervisor. We reuse the same mechanism, but inject it from SVSM, then directly into the guest VMPL0. This way we do not have to make any changes in the guest OS.

For running this demo, you need:

• AMD processor that supports SEV-SNP
• Coconut Linux kernel installed, you can build it yourself or install it via copr in Fedora:
  • Coconut source kernel code. [optional]
    You can build the host kernel by following the instructions here: https://github.com/coconut-svsm/svsm/blob/main/Documentation/INSTALL.md#preparing-the-host
  • Fedora copr package

sudo dnf copr enable -y @virtmaint-sig/sev-snp-coconut
sudo dnf install kernel-snp-coconut

# Note: installation may fail on Fedora 39, in which case the
# following steps may help:

sudo dnf install 'dnf-command(download)' rpmdevtools
cd /tmp
dnf --releasever=38 download grubby
rpmdev-extract grubby*.rpm
cd grubby*fc38.x86_64
sudo cp usr/sbin/installkernel /usr/sbin

# Retry the installation
sudo dnf reinstall kernel-snp-coconut

This repository contains the QEMU code, EDK2 code, and several Rust projects, so I recommend that you install the following packages (for Fedora 39) to use the scripts contained in this demo:

sudo dnf builddep https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/qemu/raw/f39/f/qemu.spec
sudo dnf builddep https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/edk2/raw/f39/f/edk2.spec
sudo dnf install cargo rust rust-std-static-x86_64-unknown-none

This operation is only required the first time, or when git submodules are updated

./prepare.sh

This is only required the first time or when you want to regenerate a new image (for example, with a different encryption key).

The script will also install the coconut kernel for the guest, put the efi_secret module in the initrd, and configure /etc/crypttab to look at /sys/kernel/security/secrets/coco/736869e5-84f0-4973-92ec-06879ce3da0b for the encryption key coming from SVSM.

./build-vm-image.sh --passphrase <LUKS passphrase>

This script starts in the host the Key Broker server (it will be remote in a real scenaio) and the proxy used by SVSM to communicate with the server. The proxy forwards requests arriving from SVSM via a serial port to the http connection with the server.

./start-kbs.sh

This script first calculates the launch measurement (SVSM, OVMF, etc.) and then registers it in the Key Broker server along with the rootfs encryption key.

./register-secret-in-kbs.sh --passphrase <LUKS passphrase>

And finally we launch our CVM which will receive the key from the Key Broker server and mount the rootfs by decrypting it.

sudo ./start-cvm.sh