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Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/4] keys: Introduce a keys frontend for attestation
 reports
From:   James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>
To:     "Huang, Kai" <kai.huang@intel.com>,
        "Williams, Dan J" <dan.j.williams@intel.com>,
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Date:   Tue, 01 Aug 2023 08:30:23 -0400
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On Tue, 2023-08-01 at 08:03 -0400, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Tue, 2023-08-01 at 11:45 +0000, Huang, Kai wrote:
> [...]
> > 
> > Sorry perhaps a dumb question to ask:
> > 
> > As it has been adequately put, the remote verifiable report
> > normally contains a nonce.  For instance, it can be a per-session
> > or per-request nonce from the remote verification service to the
> > confidential VM.  
> > 
> > IIUC, exposing attestation report via /sysfs means many processes
> > (in the confidential VM) can potentially see the report and the
> > nonce. My question is whether such nonce should be considered as a
> > secret thus should be only visible to the process which is
> > responsible for talking to the remote verification service?  Using
> > IOCTL seems can avoid such exposure.
> 
> OK, so the nonce seems to be a considerably misunderstood piece of
> this (and not just by you), so I'll try to go over carefully what it
> is and why.  The problem we have in pretty much any signature based
> attestation evidence scheme is when I, the attesting party, present
> the signed evidence to you, the relying part, how do you know I got
> it today from the system in question not five days ago when I happen
> to have engineered the correct conditions?  The solution to this
> currency problem is to incorporate a challenge supplied by the
> relying party (called a nonce) into the signature.  The nonce must be
> unpredictable enough that the attesting party can't guess it
> beforehand and it must be unique so that the attesting party can't go
> through its records and find an attestation signature with the same
> nonce and supply that instead.
> 
> This property of unpredictability and uniqueness is usually satisfied
> simply by sending a random number.  However, as you can also see,
> since the nonce is supplied by the relying party to the attesting
> party, it eventually gets known to both, so can't be a secret to one
> or the other.  Because of the unpredictability requirement, it's
> generally frowned on to have nonces based on anything other than
> random numbers, because that might lead to predictability.

I suppose there is a situation where you use the nonce to bind other
details of the attesting party.  For instance, in confidential
computing, the parties often exchange secrets after successful
attestation.  To do this, the attesting party generates an ephemeral
public key.  It then communicates the key binding by constructing a new
nonce as

<new nonce> = hash( <relying party nonce> || <public key> )

and using that new nonce in the attestation report signature.

So the relying party can also reconstruct the new nonce (if it knows
the key) and verify that it has a current attestation report *and* that
the attesting party wants secrets encrypted to <public key>.  This
scheme does rely on the fact that the thing generating the attestation
signature must only send reports to the owner of the enclave, so that
untrusted third parties, like the host owner, can't generate a report
with their own nonce and thus fake out the key exchange.

James