Re: [PATCH v1] driver: base: Add driver filter support

[Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>]

On Wed, Aug 4, 2021 at 2:07 PM Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Aug 04, 2021 at 01:11:27PM -0700, Dan Williams wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 4, 2021 at 12:29 PM Greg Kroah-Hartman
> > <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> > > Why not just make distros that want to support this type of platform,
> > > also provide these tiny kernel images?  Why are you pushing this work on
> > > the kernel community instead?
> >
> > In fact, these questions are where I started when first encountering
> > this proposal. Andi has addressed the single kernel image constraint,
> > but I want to pick up on this "pushing work to the kernel community"
> > contention. The small list of vetted drivers that a TDX guest needs
> > will be built-in and maintained in the kernel by the protected guest
> > developer community, so no "pushing work" there. However, given that
> > any driver disable mechanism needs to touch the driver core I
> > advocated to go ahead and make this a general purpose capability to
> > pick up where this [1] conversation left off. I.e. a general facility
> > for the corner cases that modprobe and kernel config policy can not
> > reach. Corner cases like VMM attacking the VM, or broken hardware with
> > a built-in driver that can't be unbound after the fact.
>
> I don't understand how this defends against a hypervisor attacking a
> guest.  If the hardware exists, the hypervisor can access it, regardless
> of whether the driver is default-disabled by configuration.

The "hardware" in this case is virtual devices presented by the VMM to
the VM. So if a driver misbehaves in a useful way for an attacker to
exploit, they can stimulate that behavior with a custom crafted
virtual device, and that driver will autoload unaware of the threat
without this filter for vetted drivers.