AMD SEV-SNP attestation

This page explains details of the AMD SEV-SNP attestation that are especially relevant for the implementation in Contrast. You should be familiar with attestation basics. For more details on SEV-SNP, see the whitepapers and specifications from AMD.

The key component for attesting AMD SEV-SNP is the Secure Processor (SP). It measures the confidential VM (CVM) and metadata and returns an attestation report reflecting those measurements.

Startup

The SP extends the launch digest each time the hypervisor donates a page to the CVM during startup via SNP_LAUNCH_UPDATE. On an abstract level, the launch digest is extended as follows:

LD := Hash(LD || Page || Page Metadata)

When the Hypervisor calls SNP_LAUNCH_FINISH, it provides the SP with the HOST_DATA, the ID_BLOCK, and ID_AUTH block.

The HOST_DATA is opaque to the SP. Kata writes the hash of the kata policy in this field to bind the policy to the CVM. HOST_DATA is later reflected in the attestation report.

ID block structure

The ID block contains fields that identify the VM. The following table shows the fields that are relevant for Contrast. The complete structure can be found in the SEV Secure Nested Paging Firmware ABI Specification in table 75.

Field	Description	Contrast usage
LD	The expected launch digest of the guest.	Expected launch digest over kernel, initrd, and cmdline of the CVM.
POLICY	The policy of the guest.

During startup, the SP compares the measurement it calculated to the LD in the ID block. If they don't match, the SP aborts the boot process. Similarly, if the policy doesn't match the configuration of the CVM, the SP aborts also.

ID auth structure

The ID auth structure exists to be able to verify the ID block structure. A CVM image can be started with for example various different policies. Moreover, the ID block itself can't be verified later, since it's not part of the attestation report. The intended use is that a trusted party creates an ECDSA-384 ID key pair and signs the ID block structure. Both the signature and the public part of the ID key are then passed via the hypervisor to the SP. The SP verifies the signature and keeps a SHA-384 digest of the public key. The SP adds this digest in every attestation report requested by the CVM.

The complete structure can be found in the SEV Secure Nested Paging Firmware ABI Specification in table 76.

Field	Description	Contrast usage
ID_BLOCK_SIG	The signature of all bytes of the ID block.	Constant value of (r,s) = (2,1)
ID_KEY	The public component of the ID key.	Deterministically derived from the ID block and ID_BLOCK_SIG (see Anonymous ID block signing)

Guest policy structure

The guest policy structure is embedded in the ID block in the POLICY field. The complete structure can be found in the SEV Secure Nested Paging Firmware ABI Specification in table 10.

Field	Description	Value on cloud-hypervisor	Value on QEMU
CIPHERTEXT_HIDING_DRAM	0: Ciphertext hiding for the DRAM may be enabled or disabled. 1: Ciphertext hiding for the DRAM must be enabled.	0	0
RAPL_DIS	0: Allow Running Average Power Limit (RAPL). 1: RAPL must be disabled	0	0
MEM_AES_256_XTS	0: Allow either AES 128 XEX or AES 256 XTS for memory encryption. 1: Require AES 256 XTS for memory encryption.	0	0
CXL_ALLOW	0: CXL can't be populated with devices or memory. 1: CXL can be populated with devices or memory.	0	0
SINGLE_SOCKET	0: Guest can be activated on multiple sockets. 1: Guest can be activated only on one socket.	0	0
DEBUG	0: Debugging is disallowed. 1: Debugging is allowed	0	0
MIGRATE_MA	0: Association with a migration agent is disallowed. 1: Association with a migration agent is allowed.	0	0
SMT	0: SMT is disallowed. 1: SMT is allowed.	1	1
ABI_MAJOR	The minimum ABI major version required for this guest to run.	0	0
ABI_MINOR	The minimum ABI minor version required for this guest to run.	31	0

Attestation report

The attestation report is signed by the Versioned Chip Endorsement Key (VCEK). The SP derives this key from the chip unique secret and the following REPORTED_TCB information:

1. SP bootloader SVN
2. SP OS SVN
3. SNP firmware SVN
4. Microcode patch level

With those parameters, one can retrieve a certificate signing the VCEK from the AMD Key Distribution Service (KDS) by querying https://kdsintf.amd.com/vcek/v1/{product_name}/{hwid}?{params}

This VCEK certificate is signed by the AMD SEV CA certificate, which is signed by the AMD Root CA.

AMD Root CA --> AMD SEV CA --> VCEK -- signs --> Report

The Contrast CLI embeds the AMD Root CA and AMD SEV CA certificate.

Attestation report structure

The following table shows the most important fields of the attestation report and how they're used by Contrast. The complete structure can be found in the SEV Secure Nested Paging Firmware ABI Specification in table 23.

Field	Description	Contrast usage
VERSION	Version number of this attestation report. Set to 3h for this specification.
PLATFORM_INFO	Information about the platform. See Table below
REPORT_DATA	If REQUEST_SOURCE is guest provided, then contains Guest-provided data, else host request and zero (0) filled by firmware.	Digest of nonce provided by the relying party and TLS public key of the CVM.
MEASUREMENT	The measurement calculated at launch.	Digest over kernel, initrd, and cmdline.
HOST_DATA	Data provided by the hypervisor at launch.	Digest of the kata policy.
ID_KEY_DIGEST	SHA-384 digest of the ID public key that signed the ID block provided in SNP_LAUNCH_FINISH.	Deterministic function of the SNP policy and launch digest in the ID_BLOCK. (see Anonymous ID block signing)
LAUNCH_TCB	The CurrentTcb at the time the guest was launched or imported.	Lowest TCB the guest ever executed with.
SIGNATURE	Signature of bytes 0h to 29Fh inclusive of this report.	Used to verify the integrity and authenticity of the report.

Platform info structure

The platform info structure is embedded in the attestation report in the PLATFORM_INFO field. The complete structure can be found in the SEV Secure Nested Paging Firmware ABI Specification in table 24.

Field	Description
ALIAS_CHECK_COMPLETE	Indicates that alias detection has completed since the last system reset and there are no aliasing addresses. Resets to 0. Contains mitigation for CVE-2024-21944.
CIPHERTEXT_HIDING_DRAM_EN	Indicates ciphertext hiding is enabled for the DRAM.
RAPL_DIS	Indicates that the RAPL feature is disabled.
ECC_EN	Indicates that the platform is using error correcting codes for memory. Present when EccMemReporting feature bit is set.
TSME_EN	Indicates that TSME is enabled in the system.
SMT_EN	Indicates that SMT is enabled in the system.

Anonymous ID block signing

As described in startup, the SP checks the signature of the ID block with the public key provided in the ID auth block. The common usage of such signatures is to know that a trusted party holding the private key has signed the ID block. Since the ID block is part of for example the IGVM headers of the VM image, they're bound to the runtimeClass Contrast sets up during installation. Therefore, the ID auth block and the signature and public key has to be provided by Contrast, but the authors of Contrast shouldn't be part of the TCB.

To have both the ability to sign ID blocks and not be part of the TCB, we must ensure that there exists no private key for the ID_KEY in the ID auth structure. For this, we implement ECDSA public key recovery. The algorithm is defined in SEC 1: Elliptic Curve Cryptography. The algorithm calculates an ECDSA public key given a message and its signature. We keep the signature constant as (r,s) = (2,1) for all versions and use the given ID block containing the guest policy and launch digest as an input. The recovery algorithm returns two valid public keys. We choose the smaller one, meaning the one with the smaller x value and, if equal, the one with the smaller y value.

Since we don't generate any private key material during recovery and calculating the private key from only the message, signature, and public key is cryptographically hard, no one can forge (ID block, signature) combinations under the same public key.