Linux Security Summit Europe 2024

Confidential computing (CC) is about processing application data in a trusted execution environment (TEE) that is provided by the hardware platform. Moreover, CC includes one crucial feature: remote attestation is used to get a proof of the TEE and the runtime environment authenticity and integrity before any secrets get provisioned. To ease confidential computing adoption, a smooth transition is critical. While confidential virtual machines allow users to easily move their existing workloads to run in TEEs making them attestation aware may still be disruptive. Ideally, no changes should be needed even when attestation gets involved. Linux Keyring offers an interesting choice to solve the challenge. By design, it can handle and store secrets without forcing workloads having to know about the security details involved. In this talk, we are going to cover the basics of CC and Linux Keyring. The main focus of the talk is to discuss how Linux Keyring can be leveraged to hide the attestation details in different use cases and some of the benefits it brings. We'll be demonstrating the ideas using two examples: filesystem encryption key provisioning and attestation token provisioning.