I would like to add an agenda item to discuss the level of security support that will be asserted in SUPPORT.md for driver domains which contain untrusted PCI devices. Will Xen security support be different for SR-IOV devices? GPUs vs. NICs?
There have been past discussions on this topic and a proposed PCI-iommu-bugs.txt file to help Xen users and developers understand the risks [2][3][4] that may arise from a hostile device and potentially buggy firmware. If we can document specific risks, we can ask firmware developers to make specific improvements to improve the security of PCI emulation.
There is an active effort [4] underway to improve firmware security in servers (and eventually desktops), including a reduction of attack surface due to SMM. There is also work underway [5][6] to perform secure boot between individual PCI devices and server motherboards. Some of these concepts may already be deployed in Azure.
Several stakeholders will be attending or presenting at the PSEC [6] conference.
Rich
