[Devel] Re: [patch -mm 08/17] nsproxy: add hashtable

[Serge E. Hallyn]

Quoting Herbert Poetzl (herbert at 13thfloor.at):
> On Mon, Dec 11, 2006 at 04:01:15PM -0600, Serge E. Hallyn wrote:
> > Quoting Eric W. Biederman (ebiederm at xmission.com):
> > > "Serge E. Hallyn" <serue at us.ibm.com> writes:
> > >
> > > > Quoting Eric W. Biederman (ebiederm at xmission.com):
> > > >
> > > > Yeah, that occurred to me, but it doesn't seem like we can possibly make
> > > > sufficient guarantees to the client to make this worthwhile.
> > > >
> > > > I'd love to be wrong about that, but if nothing else we can't prove to
> > > > the client that they're running on an unhacked host.  So the host admin
> > > > will always have to be trusted.
> > >
> > > To some extent that is true.  Although all security models we have
> > > currently fall down if you hack the kernel, or run your kernel
> > > in a hacked virtual environment.  It would be nice if under normal
> > > conditions you could mount an encrypted filesystem only in a container
> > > and not have concerns of those files escaping.
> >
> > Hmm, well perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic - IBM research did have a
> > demo based on TPM of remote attestation, which may be usable for
> > ensuring that you're connecting to a service on your virtual machine on
> > a certain (unhacked) kernel on particular hardware, in which case what
> > you're talking about may be possible - given a stringent initial
> > environment (i.e. not the 'gimme $20/month for a hosted partition in
> > arizona' environment).
> 
> interesting, how would you _ensure_ from inside
> such an environment, that nobody tampered with
> the kernel you are running on?

Sorry, took awhile to find the best reference, but I guess this would be
it:

http://domino.research.ibm.com/library/cyberdig.nsf/1e4115aea78b6e7c85256b360066f0d4/459e9a2b1f668aee85256f330067589f

Another description is

http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_people.nsf/pages/sailer.ima.html

I guess it was in 2004 that they did a demo of remote attestion at the
RSA conference, as described in the third to last paragraph in
http://cio.co.nz/cio.nsf/0/03943645293DB008CC256E47005D8EA2?OpenDocument
and in
http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/news.20040218_linux.html

-serge
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