On Fri, 2020-01-31 at 09:44 -0500, Vineeth Remanan Pillai wrote:
> > Basically, core-scheduling would prevent VM-to-VM attacks while ASI
> > would mitigate VM-to-hypervisor attacks.
> > 
> > Of course, such a solution would need to be fully implemented and
> > evaluated too... I just wanted to toss it around, mostly to know
> > what
> > you think about it and whether or not it is already on your radar.
> 
> We had this discussion during LPC. 
>
I know. I wanted to be there, but couldn't. But I watched the
recordings of the miniconf. :-)

> Its something on the radar, but we
> haven't yet spend any dedicated time looking into it.
> Theoretically it is very promising. While looking into practical
> aspects,
> the main difficulty is to determine what is safe/unsafe to expose in
> the kernel when the sibling is running in userland/VM. Coming up with
> a
> minimal pagetable for the kernel when sibling is running untrusted
> code
> would be non-trivial.
> 
It is. And this is exactly my point. :-)

I mean, what you're describing is pretty much what the memory isolation
efforts are mostly (all?) about, at least AFAIUI.

Therefore, I think we should see about "joining forces".

FWIW, there's a talk about ASI going on right now at FOSDEM2020:
https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/kernel_address_space_isolation/
(this is also video recorded, so it will be possible for everyone to
watch it, in a few days time).

> Its definitely worth spending some time and effort on this idea.
> 
Cool! Happy to hear this. :-)

Regards
-- 
Dario Faggioli, Ph.D
http://about.me/dario.faggioli
Virtualization Software Engineer
SUSE Labs, SUSE https://www.suse.com/
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