Device Attestation in Hardware TEE based Confidential Computing

Device attestation is necessary for maintaining confidentiality of workload in a hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) virtual machine (VM) when transferring workload to a device for acceleration.

• Physical devices in TEE environment
• Device attestation model
• Verification of device identity and evidence information
• Device initialization flow

In order to maintain the confidentiality of the workload, the VM should perform the device attestation to ensure that the VM is communicating with an authentic device with expected status, such as secure version number and mutable firmware measurement version.

Confidential computing protects data in use by performing computation in a hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). One use case is that a TEE virtual machine (VM) may want to transfer the workload to a device for acceleration. In order to maintain the confidentiality of the workload, the VM should perform the device attestation to ensure that the VM is communicating with an authentic device with expected status, such as secure version number and mutable firmware measurement version. This presentation will discuss the device attestation model and how to apply the model to support the device attestation in the TEE VM, including how the VM collects the device identity and evidence information and how the VM verifies the information before accepting the device for offloading the workload.