Assured Confidential Execution (ACE) for RISC-V

ACE-RISCV is an open-source project, whose goal is to deliver a confidential computing framework with a formally proven security monitor. It is based on a canonical architecture and targets RISC-V with the goal of being portable to other architectures. The formal verification efforts focus on the security monitor implementation. We invite collaborators to work with us to push the boundaries of provable confidential computing technology.

This is an active research project, without warranties of any kind. Please read our paper to learn about our approach and goals.

We are currently building on RISC-V with hypervisor extentions. We will adapt the AP-TEE extension once it is ratified.

Quick Start

Follow instructions to run a sample confidential workload under an untrusted Linux-based hypervisor in an emulated RISC-V environment.

Requirements

Full compilation of the framework takes a long time because all the tools are built from sources. Our tool chain currently includes: RISC-V emulator (qemu), hypervisor kernel (Linux kernel), and firmware (security monitor with OpenSBI firmware). Make sure to build this project on a machine with at least 4 cores, 4GB RAM, and 50GB disk space for reasonable (~30min) build time.

Dependencies

You must install build dependencies specific to the operating system you use AND install the Rust toolchain.

Dependencies for Ubuntu 22.04

sudo apt update

# riscv-gnu-toolchain dependencies:
sudo apt -qq -y install autoconf automake autotools-dev curl python3 libmpc-dev libmpfr-dev libgmp-dev gawk build-essential bison flex texinfo gperf libtool patchutils bc zlib1g-dev libexpat-dev

# OpenSBI
sudo apt -qq -y install clang

# Qemu
sudo apt -qq -y install git libglib2.0-dev libfdt-dev libpixman-1-dev zlib1g-dev ninja-build 

# Buildroot
sudo apt -qq -y install unzip sed binutils diffutils build-essential bash patch gzip bzip2 perl tar cpio unzip rsync file bc findutils

# utilities
sudo apt install -y sshpass

Install the latest Rust:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh -s -- -y
source "$HOME/.cargo/env"
rustup default nightly
rustup target add riscv64gc-unknown-none-elf
rustup component add rustfmt
cargo install cargo-binutils

# check that the below lines are in the ~/.bashrc
. "$HOME/.cargo/env"

Sources & Patches

Checkout this repository with submodules (this takes a long time!):

git clone --recurse-submodules [email protected]:IBM/ACE-RISCV.git

Compilation

Prerequisites

Run the following commands from the directory containing this README file.

Set up the ACE_DIR variable to point to the location where the project will build. Default is the build/ subdirectory of the location where you will execute make command.

export ACE_DIR=/your/path/to/build/ace

Build everything

The following command will build the entire framework. Set -j flag to the number of processor cores you have in the system.

MAKEFLAGS="--silent -j4" make

Build individual components

Alternativly, you can build individual components to avoid long builds that can lead to 'ssh disconnections', 'hangups', and similar issues.

Install all develoment tools required to compile code for risc-v architecture:

make devtools

Build the host and guest Linux-based OSes

make hypervisor

Build the firmware that will boot the system and the security monitor (SM)

make firmware

Build the RISC-V emulator and tools that will simplify running the test environment

make emulator

Run and Test

Make sure you have the ACE_DIR environmental variable set and it points to the location of your build. Check 'compilation' section in case this variable is not set.

echo $ACE_DIR

To run the test environment on a RISC-V emulator run:

${ACE_DIR}/tools/ace run

You should see the output from the boot process and a promt to login to the hypervisor.

# login: root, password: passwd

To run the sample confidential VM execute:

./run.sh

License

This repository is distributed under the terms of the Apache 2.0 License, see LICENSE.

Citation

@inproceedings{ozga2023riscvtee,
    title={Towards a Formally Verified Security Monitor for VM-based Confidential Computing},
    author={Ozga, Wojciech and Hunt, Guerney D. H. and Le, Michael V. and Palmer, Elaine R. and Shinnar, Avraham},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Hardware and Architectural Support for Security and Privacy},
    series = {HASP2023},
    year={2023}
}