Provided by: xen-utils-common_4.16.2-1_amd64 
NAME
xen-vtpmgr - Xen virtual TPM stubdomain
Authors
Daniel De Graaf <dgdegra@tycho.nsa.gov>
Quan Xu <quan.xu@intel.com>
This document describes the operation and command line interface of vtpmmgr-stubdom. See
xen-vtpm(7) for details on the vTPM subsystem as a whole.
Overview
The TPM Manager has three primary functions:
1. Securely store the encryption keys for vTPMs
2. Provide a single controlled path of access to the physical TPM
3. Provide evidence (via TPM Quotes) of the current configuration
When combined with a platform that provides a trusted method for creating domains, the TPM
Manager provides assurance that the private keys in a vTPM are only available in specific
trusted configurations.
The manager accepts commands from the vtpm-stubdom domains via the mini-os TPM backend
driver. The vTPM manager communicates directly with hardware TPM using the mini-os tpm_tis
driver.
Boot Configurations and TPM Groups
The TPM Manager's data is secured by using the physical TPM's seal operation, which allows
data to be bound to specific PCRs. These PCRs are populated in the physical TPM during the
boot process, either by the firmware/BIOS or by a dynamic launch environment such as
TBOOT. In order to provide assurance of the system's security, the PCRs used to seal the
TPM manager's data must contain measurements for domains used to bootstrap the TPM Manager
and vTPMs.
Because these measurements are based on hashes, they will change any time that any
component of the system is upgraded. Since it is not possible to construct a list of all
possible future good measurements, the job of approving configurations is delegated to a
third party, referred to here as the system approval agent (SAA). The SAA is identified by
its public (RSA) signature key, which is used to sign lists of valid configurations. A
single TPM manager can support multiple SAAs via the use of vTPM groups. Each group is
associated with a single SAA; this allows the creation of a multi-tenant environment where
tenants may not all choose to trust the same SAA.
Each vTPM is bound to a vTPM group at the time of its creation. Each vTPM group has its
own AIK in the physical TPM for quotes of the hardware TPM state; when used with a
conforming Privacy CA, this allows each group on the system to form the basis of a
distinct identity.
Initial Provisioning
When the TPM Manager first boots up, it will create a stub vTPM group along with entries
for any vTPMs that communicate with it. This stub group must be provisioned with an SAA
and a boot configuration in order to survive a reboot.
When a vTPM is connected to the TPM Manager using a UUID that is not recognized, a slot
will be created in group 0 for it. In the future, this auto-creation may be restricted to
specific UUIDs (such as the all-zero UUID) to enforce the use of the TPM manager as the
generator of the UUID. The first vTPM to be connected is given administrative privileges
for the TPM Manager, and should be attached to dom0 or a control domain in order to send
provisioning commands.
Provisioning a vTPM group for the system requires the public key of the SAA and privacy CA
data used to certify the AIK (see the TPM spec for details). Once the group is created, a
signed list of boot measurements can be installed. The initial group controls the ability
to boot the system as a whole, and cannot be deleted once provisioned.
Command Line Arguments
Command line arguments are passed to the domain via the 'extra' parameter in the VM config
file. Each parameter is separated by white space. For example:
extra="foo=bar baz"
Valid arguments:
srk_handle=<HANDLE>
Specify a srk_handle for TPM 2.0. TPM 2.0 uses a key hierarchy, and this allow
specifying the parent handle for vtpmmgr to create its own key under. Using this
option bypasses vtpmmgr trying to take ownership of the TPM.
owner_auth=<AUTHSPEC>
srk_auth=<AUTHSPEC>
Set the owner and SRK authdata for the TPM. If not specified, the default is 160 zero
bits (the well-known auth value). Valid values of <AUTHSPEC> are:
well-known
Use the well known auth (default)
hash:<HASH>
Use the given 40-character ASCII hex string
text:<STR>
Use sha1 hash of <STR>.
tpmdriver=<DRIVER>
Choose the driver used for communication with the hardware TPM. Values other than
tpm_tis should only be used for testing.
The possible values of <DRIVER> are:
tpm_tis
Direct communication with a hardware TPM 1.2. The domain must have access to TPM
IO memory. (default)
tpmfront
Use the Xen tpmfront interface to talk to another domain which provides access to
the TPM.
The following options only apply to the tpm_tis driver:
tpmiomem=<ADDR>
The base address of the hardware memory pages of the TPM. The default is 0xfed40000,
as defined by the TCG's PC Client spec.
tpmirq=<IRQ>
The irq of the hardware TPM if using interrupts. A value of "probe" can be set to
probe for the irq. A value of 0 disables interrupts and uses polling (default 0).
tpmlocality=<LOC>
Attempt to use locality <LOC> of the hardware TPM. For full functionality of the TPM
Manager, this should be set to "2".
Platform Security Assumptions
While the TPM Manager has the ability to check the hash of the vTPM requesting a key,
there is currently no trusted method to inform the TPM Manager of the hash of each new
domain. Because of this, the TPM Manager trusts the UUID key in Xenstore to identify a
vTPM in a trusted manner. The XSM policy may be used to strengthen this assumption if the
creation of vTPM-labeled domains is more constrained (for example, only permitted to a
domain builder service): the only grants mapped by the TPM Manager should belong to vTPM
domains, so restricting the ability to map other domain's granted pages will prevent other
domains from directly requesting keys from the TPM Manager. The TPM Manager uses the hash
of the XSM label of the attached vTPM as the kernel hash, so vTPMs with distinct labels
may be further partitioned using vTPM groups.
A domain with direct access to the hardware TPM will be able to decrypt the TPM Manager's
disk image if the haredware TPM's PCR values are in a permitted configuration. To protect
the TPM Manager's data, the list of permitted configurations should be chosen to include
PCRs that measure the hypervisor, domain 0, the TPM Manager, and other critical
configuration such as the XSM policy. If the TPM Manager is configured to use locality 2
as recommended, it is safe to permit the hardware domain to access locality 0 (the default
in Linux), although concurrent use of the TPM should be avoided as it can result in
unexpected busy errors from the TPM driver. The ability to access locality 2 of the TPM
should be enforced using IO memory labeling in the XSM policy; the physical address
0xFED42xxx is always locality 2 for TPMs using the TIS driver.
Appendix: unsecured migration process for vtpmmgr domain upgrade
There is no direct upgrade supported from previous versions of the vtpmmgr domain due to
changes in the on-disk format and the method used to seal data. If a vTPM domain supports
migration, this feature should be used to migrate the vTPM's data; however, the vTPM
packaged with Xen does not yet support migration.
If adding migration support to the vTPM is not desired, a simpler migration domain usable
only for local migration can be constructed. The migration process would look like the
following:
1. Start the old vtpmmgr
2. Start the vTPM migration domain
3. Attach the vTPM migration domain's vtpm/0 device to the old vtpmmgr
4. Migration domain executes vtpmmgr_LoadHashKey on vtpm/0
5. Start the new vtpmmgr, possibly shutting down the old one first
6. Attach the vTPM migration domain's vtpm/1 device to the new vtpmmgr
7. Migration domain executes vtpmmgr_SaveHashKey on vtpm/1
This requires the migration domain to be added to the list of valid vTPM kernel hashes. In
the current version of the vtpmmgr domain, this is the hash of the XSM label, not the
kernel.
Appendix B: vtpmmgr on TPM 2.0
WARNING: Incomplete - cannot persist data
TPM 2.0 support for vTPM manager is incomplete. There is no support for persisting an
encryption key, so vTPM manager regenerates primary and secondary key handles each boot.
Also, the vTPM manger group command implementation hardcodes TPM 1.2 commands. This means
running manage-vtpmmgr.pl fails when the TPM 2.0 hardware rejects the TPM 1.2 commands.
vTPM manager with TPM 2.0 cannot create groups and therefore cannot persist vTPM contents.
Manager disk image setup:
The vTPM Manager requires a disk image to store its encrypted data. The image does not
require a filesystem and can live anywhere on the host disk. The image is not large; the
Xen 4.5 vtpmmgr is limited to using the first 2MB of the image but can support more than
20,000 vTPMs.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/vtpm2/vmgr bs=16M count=1
Manager config file:
The vTPM Manager domain (vtpmmgr-stubdom) must be started like any other Xen virtual
machine and requires a config file. The manager requires a disk image for storage and
permission to access the hardware memory pages for the TPM. The disk must be presented as
"hda", and the TPM memory pages are passed using the iomem configuration parameter. The
TPM TIS uses 5 pages of IO memory (one per locality) that start at physical address
0xfed40000. By default, the TPM manager uses locality 0 (so only the page at 0xfed40 is
needed).
Add:
extra="tpm2=1"
extra option to launch vtpmmgr-stubdom domain on TPM 2.0, and ignore it on TPM 1.x. for
example:
kernel="/usr/lib/xen/boot/vtpmmgr-stubdom.gz"
memory=128
disk=["file:/home/vtpm2/vmgr,hda,w"]
name="vtpmmgr"
iomem=["fed40,5"]
extra="tpm2=1"
Key Hierarchy
+------------------+
| vTPM's secrets | ...
+------------------+
| ^
| |(Bind / Unbind)
- - - - - -v |- - - - - - - - TPM 2.0
+------------------+
| SK +
+------------------+
| ^
v |
+------------------+
| SRK |
+------------------+
| ^
v |
+------------------+
| TPM 2.0 Storage |
| Primary Seed |
+------------------+
Now the secrets for the vTPMs are only being bound to the presence of thephysical TPM 2.0.
Since using PCRs to seal the data can be an important security feature that users of the
vtpmmgr rely on. I will replace TPM2_Bind/TPM2_Unbind with TPM2_Seal/TPM2_Unseal to
provide as much security as it did for TPM 1.2 in later series of patch.
Design Overview
The architecture of vTPM subsystem on TPM 2.0 is described below:
+------------------+
| Linux DomU | ...
| | ^ |
| v | |
| xen-tpmfront |
+------------------+
| ^
v |
+------------------+
| mini-os/tpmback |
| | ^ |
| v | |
| vtpm-stubdom | ...
| | ^ |
| v | |
| mini-os/tpmfront |
+------------------+
| ^
v |
+------------------+
| mini-os/tpmback |
| | ^ |
| v | |
| vtpmmgr-stubdom |
| | ^ |
| v | |
| mini-os/tpm2_tis |
+------------------+
| ^
v |
+------------------+
| Hardware TPM 2.0 |
+------------------+
Linux DomU
The Linux based guest that wants to use a vTPM. There many be more than one of these.
xen-tpmfront.ko
Linux kernel virtual TPM frontend driver. This driver provides vTPM access to a para-
virtualized Linux based DomU.
mini-os/tpmback
Mini-os TPM backend driver. The Linux frontend driver connects to this backend driver
to facilitate communications between the Linux DomU and its vTPM. This driver is also
used by vtpmmgr-stubdom to communicate with vtpm-stubdom.
vtpm-stubdom
A mini-os stub domain that implements a vTPM. There is a one to one mapping between
running vtpm-stubdom instances and logical vtpms on the system. The vTPM Platform
Configuration Registers (PCRs) are all initialized to zero.
mini-os/tpmfront
Mini-os TPM frontend driver. The vTPM mini-os domain vtpm-stubdom uses this driver to
communicate with vtpmmgr-stubdom. This driver could also be used separately to
implement a mini-os domain that wishes to use a vTPM of its own.
vtpmmgr-stubdom
A mini-os domain that implements the vTPM manager. There is only one vTPM manager and
it should be running during the entire lifetime of the machine. This domain regulates
access to the physical TPM on the system and secures the persistent state of each
vTPM.
mini-os/tpm2_tis
Mini-os TPM version 2.0 TPM Interface Specification (TIS) driver. This driver used by
vtpmmgr-stubdom to talk directly to the hardware TPM 2.0. Communication is facilitated
by mapping hardware memory pages into vtpmmgr-stubdom.
Hardware TPM 2.0
The physical TPM 2.0 that is soldered onto the motherboard.
Noted:
functionality for a virtual guest operating system (a DomU) is still TPM 1.2.