Hardening the virtualization layers¶
In the beginning of this chapter we discuss the use of both physical and virtual hardware by instances, the associated security risks, and some recommendations for mitigating those risks. Then we discuss how the Secure Encrypted Virtualization technology can be used to encrypt the memory of VMs on AMD-based machines which support the technology. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of sVirt, an open source project for integrating SELinux mandatory access controls with the virtualization components.
Physical hardware (PCI passthrough)¶
Many hypervisors offer a functionality known as PCI passthrough. This allows an instance to have direct access to a piece of hardware on the node. For example, this could be used to allow instances to access video cards or GPUs offering the compute unified device architecture (CUDA) for high performance computation. This feature carries two types of security risks: direct memory access and hardware infection.
Direct memory access (DMA) is a feature that permits certain hardware devices to access arbitrary physical memory addresses in the host computer. Often video cards have this capability. However, an instance should not be given arbitrary physical memory access because this would give it full view of both the host system and other instances running on the same node. Hardware vendors use an input/output memory management unit (IOMMU) to manage DMA access in these situations. We recommend cloud architects should ensure that the hypervisor is configured to utilize this hardware feature.
Note
The IOMMU feature is marketed as VT-d by Intel and AMD-Vi by AMD.
A hardware infection occurs when an instance makes a malicious modification to the firmware or some other part of a device. As this device is used by other instances or the host OS, the malicious code can spread into those systems. The end result is that one instance can run code outside of its security domain. This is a significant breach as it is harder to reset the state of physical hardware than virtual hardware, and can lead to additional exposure such as access to the management network.
Solutions to the hardware infection problem are domain specific. The strategy is to identify how an instance can modify hardware state then determine how to reset any modifications when the instance is done using the hardware. For example, one option could be to re-flash the firmware after use. There is a need to balance hardware longevity with security as some firmwares will fail after a large number of writes. TPM technology, described in Secure bootstrapping, is a solution for detecting unauthorized firmware changes. Regardless of the strategy selected, it is important to understand the risks associated with this kind of hardware sharing so that they can be properly mitigated for a given deployment scenario.
Due to the risk and complexities associated with PCI passthrough, it should be disabled by default. If enabled for a specific need, you will need to have appropriate processes in place to ensure the hardware is clean before re-issue.
Virtual hardware (QEMU)¶
When running a virtual machine, virtual hardware is a software layer that provides the hardware interface for the virtual machine. Instances use this functionality to provide network, storage, video, and other devices that may be needed. With this in mind, most instances in your environment will exclusively use virtual hardware, with a minority that will require direct hardware access. The major open source hypervisors use QEMU for this functionality. While QEMU fills an important need for virtualization platforms, it has proven to be a very challenging software project to write and maintain. Much of the functionality in QEMU is implemented with low-level code that is difficult for most developers to comprehend. The hardware virtualized by QEMU includes many legacy devices that have their own set of quirks. Putting all of this together, QEMU has been the source of many security problems, including hypervisor breakout attacks.
It is important to take proactive steps to harden QEMU. We recommend three specific steps:
Minimizing the code base.
Using compiler hardening.
Using mandatory access controls such as sVirt, SELinux, or AppArmor.
Ensure your iptables have the default policy filtering network traffic, and consider examining the existing rule set to understand each rule and determine if the policy needs to be expanded upon.
Minimizing the QEMU code base¶
We recommend minimizing the QEMU code base by removing unused components from the system. QEMU provides support for many different virtual hardware devices, however only a small number of devices are needed for a given instance. The most common hardware devices are the virtio devices. Some legacy instances will need access to specific hardware, which can be specified using glance metadata:
$ glance image-update \
--property hw_disk_bus=ide \
--property hw_cdrom_bus=ide \
--property hw_vif_model=e1000 \
f16-x86_64-openstack-sda
A cloud architect should decide what devices to make available to cloud users. Anything that is not needed should be removed from QEMU. This step requires recompiling QEMU after modifying the options passed to the QEMU configure script. For a complete list of up-to-date options simply run ./configure --help from within the QEMU source directory. Decide what is needed for your deployment, and disable the remaining options.
Compiler hardening¶
Harden QEMU using compiler hardening options. Modern compilers provide a variety of compile time options to improve the security of the resulting binaries. These features include relocation read-only (RELRO), stack canaries, never execute (NX), position independent executable (PIE), and address space layout randomization (ASLR).
Many modern Linux distributions already build QEMU with compiler hardening enabled, we recommend verifying your existing executable before proceeding. One tool that can assist you with this verification is called checksec.sh
- RELocation Read-Only (RELRO)
Hardens the data sections of an executable. Both full and partial RELRO modes are supported by gcc. For QEMU full RELRO is your best choice. This will make the global offset table read-only and place various internal data sections before the program data section in the resulting executable.
- Stack canaries
Places values on the stack and verifies their presence to help prevent buffer overflow attacks.
- Never eXecute (NX)
Also known as Data Execution Prevention (DEP), ensures that data sections of the executable can not be executed.
- Position Independent Executable (PIE)
Produces a position independent executable, which is necessary for ASLR.
- Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR)
This ensures that placement of both code and data regions will be randomized. Enabled by the kernel (all modern Linux kernels support ASLR), when the executable is built with PIE.
The following compiler options are recommend for GCC when compiling QEMU:
CFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -fstack-protector-all -Wstack-protector \
--param ssp-buffer-size=4 -pie -fPIE -ftrapv -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -O2 \
-Wl,-z,relro,-z,now"
We recommend testing your QEMU executable file after it is compiled to ensure that the compiler hardening worked properly.
Most cloud deployments will not build software, such as QEMU, by hand. It is better to use packaging to ensure that the process is repeatable and to ensure that the end result can be easily deployed throughout the cloud. The references below provide some additional details on applying compiler hardening options to existing packages.
- DEB packages:
- RPM packages:
Secure Encrypted Virtualization¶
Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) is a technology from AMD which enables the memory for a VM to be encrypted with a key unique to the VM. SEV is available in the Train release as a technical preview with KVM guests on certain AMD-based machines for the purpose of evaluating the technology.
The KVM hypervisor section of the nova configuration guide contains information needed to configure the machine and hypervisor, and lists several limitations of SEV.
SEV provides protection for data in the memory used by the running VM.
However, while the first phase of SEV integration with OpenStack enables
encrypted memory for VMs, importantly it does not provide the
LAUNCH_MEASURE or LAUNCH_SECRET capabilities which are available with
the SEV firmware. This means that data used by an SEV-protected VM may be
subject to attacks from a motivated adversary who has control of the
hypervisor. For example, a rogue administrator on the hypervisor machine could
provide a VM image for tenants with a backdoor and spyware capable of stealing
secrets, or replace the VNC server process to snoop data sent to or from the
VM console including passwords which unlock full disk encryption solutions.
To reduce the chances for a rogue administrator to gain unauthorized access to data, the following security practices should accompany the use of SEV:
A full disk encryption solution should be used by the VM.
A bootloader password should be used on the VM.
In addition, standard security best practices should be used with the VM including the following:
The VM should be well maintained, including regular security scanning and patching to ensure a continuously strong security posture for the VM.
Connections to the VM should use encrypted and authenticated protocols such as HTTPS and SSH.
Additional security tools and processes should be considered and used for the VM appropriate to the level of sensitivity of the data.
Mandatory access controls¶
Compiler hardening makes it more difficult to attack the QEMU process. However, if an attacker does succeed, you want to limit the impact of the attack. Mandatory access controls accomplish this by restricting the privileges on QEMU process to only what is needed. This can be accomplished by using sVirt, SELinux, or AppArmor. When using sVirt, SELinux is configured to run each QEMU process under a separate security context. AppArmor can be configured to provide similar functionality. We provide more details on sVirt and instance isolation in the section below sVirt: SELinux and virtualization.
Specific SELinux policies are available for many OpenStack services. CentOS
users can review these policies by installing the selinux-policy source
package. The most up to date policies appear in Fedora’s selinux-policy
repository. The rawhide-contrib branch has files that end in .te, such
as cinder.te, that can be used on systems running SELinux.
AppArmor profiles for OpenStack services do not currently exist, but the OpenStack-Ansible project handles this by applying AppArmor profiles to each container that runs an OpenStack service.
sVirt: SELinux and virtualization¶
With unique kernel-level architecture and National Security Agency (NSA) developed security mechanisms, KVM provides foundational isolation technologies for multi-tenancy. With developmental origins dating back to 2002, the Secure Virtualization (sVirt) technology is the application of SELinux against modern day virtualization. SELinux, which was designed to apply separation control based upon labels, has been extended to provide isolation between virtual machine processes, devices, data files and system processes acting upon their behalf.
OpenStack’s sVirt implementation aspires to protect hypervisor hosts and virtual machines against two primary threat vectors:
- Hypervisor threats
A compromised application running within a virtual machine attacks the hypervisor to access underlying resources. For example, when a virtual machine is able to access the hypervisor OS, physical devices, or other applications. This threat vector represents considerable risk as a compromise on a hypervisor can infect the physical hardware as well as exposing other virtual machines and network segments.
- Virtual Machine (multi-tenant) threats
A compromised application running within a VM attacks the hypervisor to access or control another virtual machine and its resources. This is a threat vector unique to virtualization and represents considerable risk as a multitude of virtual machine file images could be compromised due to vulnerability in a single application. This virtual network attack is a major concern as the administrative techniques for protecting real networks do not directly apply to the virtual environment.
Each KVM-based virtual machine is a process which is labeled by SELinux, effectively establishing a security boundary around each virtual machine. This security boundary is monitored and enforced by the Linux kernel, restricting the virtual machine’s access to resources outside of its boundary, such as host machine data files or other VMs.
sVirt isolation is provided regardless of the guest operating system running inside the virtual machine. Linux or Windows VMs can be used. Additionally, many Linux distributions provide SELinux within the operating system, allowing the virtual machine to protect internal virtual resources from threats.
Labels and categories¶
KVM-based virtual machine instances are labelled with their own SELinux data
type, known as svirt_image_t. Kernel level protections prevent unauthorized
system processes, such as malware, from manipulating the virtual machine image
files on disk. When virtual machines are powered off, images are stored as
svirt_image_t as shown below:
system_u:object_r:svirt_image_t:SystemLow image1
system_u:object_r:svirt_image_t:SystemLow image2
system_u:object_r:svirt_image_t:SystemLow image3
system_u:object_r:svirt_image_t:SystemLow image4
The svirt_image_t label uniquely identifies image files on disk, allowing
for the SELinux policy to restrict access. When a KVM-based compute image is
powered on, sVirt appends a random numerical identifier to the image. sVirt is
capable of assigning numeric identifiers to a maximum of 524,288 virtual
machines per hypervisor node, however most OpenStack deployments are highly
unlikely to encounter this limitation.
This example shows the sVirt category identifier:
system_u:object_r:svirt_image_t:s0:c87,c520 image1
system_u:object_r:svirt_image_t:s0:419,c172 image2
SELinux users and roles¶
SELinux manages user roles. These can be viewed through the -Z flag,
or with the semanage command. On the hypervisor, only administrators
should be able to access the system, and should have an appropriate context
around both the administrative users and any other users that are on the
system. For more information, see the SELinux users documentation.
Booleans¶
To ease the administrative burden of managing SELinux, many enterprise Linux platforms utilize SELinux Booleans to quickly change the security posture of sVirt.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based KVM deployments utilize the following sVirt booleans:
sVirt SELinux Boolean |
Description |
|---|---|
virt_use_common |
Allow virt to use serial or parallel communication ports. |
virt_use_fusefs |
Allow virt to read FUSE mounted files. |
virt_use_nfs |
Allow virt to manage NFS mounted files. |
virt_use_samba |
Allow virt to manage CIFS mounted files. |
virt_use_sanlock |
Allow confined virtual guests to interact with the sanlock. |
virt_use_sysfs |
Allow virt to manage device configuration (PCI). |
virt_use_usb |
Allow virt to use USB devices. |
virt_use_xserver |
Allow virtual machine to interact with the X Window System. |
