Brussels / 1 & 2 February 2025

schedule

Enabling AMD SEV technology in Xen Hypervisor.


In this talk we’re presenting our work at Vates Company of enabling Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology for Xen Project open-source hypervisor. SEV is an extension of AMD-V technology and allows to run encrypted virtual machines on the top of “untrusted” hypervisor. Even though the hypervisor still controls the lifecycle of virtual machines, it’s up to SEV enabled guest to decide whether its memory is encrypted or not. The SEV enabled hardware ensures that the hypervisor nor other software (VMs) running on the platform can’t access (decrypt) this memory. In the heart of the SEV technology is the “AMD Secure Processor” hardware component which offers an interface to the system software (hypervisor or guest kernels) allowing to manage virtual machines and the whole platform, so these pieces of software can run and communicate without compromising each other’s security. X86 instruction set was also enriched to fully benefit from SEV technology. We will present our project which targets to integrate SEV extension to Xen hypervisor, the necessary developments and adaptions that have been done, where we are with this project and our future work.

Speakers

Andrei Semenov

Links