Storage volumes may be encrypted, the XML snippet described below is used to represent the details of the encryption. It can be used as a part of a domain or storage configuration.
The top-level tag of volume encryption specification
is encryption, with a mandatory
attribute format. Currently defined values
of format are default and qcow.
Each value of format implies some expectations about the
content of the encryption tag. Other format values may be
defined in the future.
The encryption tag can currently contain a sequence of
secret tags, each with mandatory attributes type
and either uuid or usage
(since 2.1.0). The only currently defined
value of type is volume. The
uuid is "uuid" of the secret while
usage is the "usage" subelement field.
A secret value can be set in libvirt by the
virSecretSetValue API. Alternatively, if supported
by the particular volume format and driver, automatically generate a
secret value at the time of volume creation, and store it using the
specified uuid.
<encryption format="default"/> can be specified only
when creating a qcow volume. If the volume is successfully created, the
encryption formats, parameters and secrets will be auto-generated by
libvirt and the attached encryption tag will be updated.
The unmodified contents of the encryption tag can be used
in later operations with the volume, or when setting up a domain that
uses the volume.
The qcow format specifies that the built-in encryption
support in qcow- or qcow2-formatted volume
images should be used. A single
<secret type='passphrase'> element is expected. If
the secret element is not present during volume creation,
a secret is automatically generated and attached to the volume.
The luks format is specific to a luks encrypted volume
and the secret is used in order to either encrypt during volume creation
or decrypt the volume for usage by the domain. A single
<secret type='passphrase'...> element is expected.
Since 2.1.0.
For volume creation, it is possible to specify the encryption algorithm used to encrypt the luks volume. The following two optional elements may be provided for that purpose. It is hypervisor dependent as to which algorithms are supported. The default algorithm used by the storage driver backend when using qemu-img to create the volume is 'aes-256-cbc' using 'essiv' for initialization vector generation and 'sha256' hash algorithm for both the cipher and the initialization vector generation.
ciphernamesizemodehashivgencipher. If the cipher is not provided,
then an error will be generated by the parser.
namehash
Here is a simple example, specifying use of the qcow format:
<encryption format='qcow'>
<secret type='passphrase' uuid='c1f11a6d-8c5d-4a3e-ac7a-4e171c5e0d4a' />
</encryption>
Assuming a
luks volume type secret is already defined,
a simple example specifying use of the luks format
for either volume creation without a specific cipher being defined or
as part of a domain volume definition:
<encryption format='luks'>
<secret type='passphrase' uuid='f52a81b2-424e-490c-823d-6bd4235bc572'/>
</encryption>
Here is an example specifying use of the luks format for
a specific cipher algorithm for volume creation:
<volume>
<name>twofish.luks</name>
<capacity unit='G'>5</capacity>
<target>
<path>/var/lib/libvirt/images/demo.luks</path>
<format type='raw'/>
<encryption format='luks'>
<secret type='passphrase' uuid='f52a81b2-424e-490c-823d-6bd4235bc572'/>
<cipher name='twofish' size='256' mode='cbc' hash='sha256'/>
<ivgen name='plain64' hash='sha256'/>
</encryption>
</target>
</volume>