cloud-hypervisor/docs/intel_sgx.md

Intel SGX

Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX) is an Intel technology designed to increase the security of application code and data. Cloud-Hypervisor supports SGX virtualization through KVM. Because SGX is built on hardware features that cannot be emulated in software, virtualizing SGX requires support in KVM and in the host kernel. The required Linux and KVM changes can be found in the KVM SGX Tree.

Utilizing SGX in the guest requires a kernel/OS with SGX support, e.g. a kernel built using the SGX Linux Development Tree or the KVM SGX Tree. Running KVM SGX as the guest kernel allows nested virtualization of SGX.

For more information about SGX, please refer to the SGX Homepage.

For more information about SGX SDK and how to test SGX, please refer to the following instructions.

Cloud-Hypervisor support

Assuming the host exposes /dev/sgx_virt_epc, we can pass SGX enclaves through the guest.

In order to use SGX enclaves within a Cloud-Hypervisor VM, we must define one or several Enclave Page Cache (EPC) sections. Here is an example of a VM being created with 2 EPC sections, the first one being 64MiB with pre-allocated memory, the second one being 32MiB with no pre-allocated memory.

./cloud-hypervisor \
    --cpus boot=1 \
    --memory size=1G \
    --disk path=focal-server-cloudimg-amd64.raw \
    --kernel vmlinux \
    --cmdline "console=ttyS0 console=hvc0 root=/dev/vda1 rw" \
    --sgx-epc size=64M,prefault=on size=32M,prefault=off

Once booted, and assuming your guest kernel contains the patches from the KVM SGX Tree, you can validate SGX devices have been correctly created under /dev/sgx:

ls /dev/sgx*
/dev/sgx_enclave  /dev/sgx_provision  /dev/sgx_virt_epc

From this point, it is possible to run any SGX application from the guest, as it will access /dev/sgx_enclave device to create dedicated SGX enclaves.

Note: There is only one contiguous SGX EPC region, which contains all SGX EPC sections. This region is exposed through ACPI and marked as reserved through the e820 table. It is treated yet as another device, which means it should appear at the end of the guest address space.