Files
confidential-containers/quickstart.md
Jiale Zhang cf2cfd873d QuickStart: Reorganize and refined simplification
Fixed: #96

The current quick start is relatively lengthy,
this commit make the technology stacks for special HW separate markdown pages:

- Use simple-kbs to encrypt container image and deploy it on SEV: `guides/sev-guide.md`
- Use Verdictd to encrypt container image and deploy it on TDX: `guides/eaa-verdictd-guide.md`

Signed-off-by: Jiale Zhang <zhangjiale@linux.alibaba.com>
2023-04-03 08:10:44 +02:00

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Getting Started

This document contains an overview of Confidential Containers use cases and support as well as a guide for installing Confidential Containers, deploying workloads, and troubleshooting if things go wrong.

Use cases

Confidential Containers (CoCo) supports the following use cases:

  • Running unencrypted containers without Confidential Computing (CC) hardware
  • Running encrypted containers without CC HW (sample container images provided)
  • Running unencrypted container images or sample encrypted images with CC HW
  • Running your own encrypted container images with CC HW

The first two cases are mainly for testing and development or new users who want to explore the project. This guide explains all four cases below.

Hardware Support and Limitations

Confidential Containers is still maturing. See release notes for currrent hardware support and limitations.

Installing

You can enable Confidential Containers in an existing Kubernetes cluster using the Confidential Containers Operator.

Note

If you need to quickly deploy a single-node test cluster, you can use the run-local.sh script from the operator test suite, which will setup a single-node cluster on your machine for testing purpose. This script requires ansible-playbook, which you can install on CentOS/RHEL using dnf install ansible-core, and the Ansible docker_container module, which you can get using ansible-galaxy collection install community.docker.

Note

You can also use a Kind or Minikube cluster with containerd runtime to try out the CoCo stack for development purposes. Make sure to use the kata-clh runtime class for your workloads when using Kind or Minikube, as QEMU is known to not be working with Kind or Minikube. Also, with the enclave-cc runtime class, the cluster must be prepared so that /opt/confidential-containers on the worker nodes is not on an overlayfs mount but the path is a hostPath mount (see a sample configuration)

Prerequisites

  • Ensure a minimum of 8GB RAM and 4 vCPU for the Kubernetes cluster node
  • Only containerd runtime based Kubernetes clusters are supported with the current CoCo release
  • The minimum Kubernetes version should be 1.24
  • Ensure at least one Kubernetes node in the cluster is having the label node-role.kubernetes.io/worker=
  • Ensure SELinux is disabled or not enforced (https://github.com/confidential-containers/operator/issues/115)

For more details on the operator, including the custom resources managed by the operator, refer to the operator docs.

Operator Installation

Deploy the the operator

Deploy the operator by running the following command where <RELEASE_VERSION> needs to be substituted with the desired release tag.

kubectl apply -k github.com/confidential-containers/operator/config/release?ref=<RELEASE_VERSION>

For example, to deploy the v0.3.0 release run:

kubectl apply -k github.com/confidential-containers/operator/config/release?ref=v0.3.0

Wait until each pod has the STATUS of Running.

kubectl get pods -n confidential-containers-system --watch

Create the custom resource

Creating a custom resource installs the required CC runtime pieces into the cluster node and creates the RuntimeClasses

kubectl apply -k github.com/confidential-containers/operator/config/samples/ccruntime/<CCRUNTIME_OVERLAY>?ref=<RELEASE_VERSION>

The current present overlays are: default and s390x

For example, to deploy the v0.3.0 release for x86_64, run:

kubectl apply -k github.com/confidential-containers/operator/config/samples/ccruntime/default?ref=v0.3.0

And to deploy v0.3.0 release for s390x, run:

kubectl apply -k github.com/confidential-containers/operator/config/samples/ccruntime/s390x?ref=v0.3.0

Wait until each pod has the STATUS of Running.

kubectl get pods -n confidential-containers-system --watch

Check the RuntimeClasses that got created.

kubectl get runtimeclass

Output:

NAME            HANDLER         AGE
kata            kata            9m55s
kata-clh        kata-clh        9m55s
kata-clh-tdx    kata-clh-tdx    9m55s
kata-qemu       kata-qemu       9m55s
kata-qemu-tdx   kata-qemu-tdx   9m55s
kata-qemu-sev   kata-qemu-sev   9m55s

Details on each of the runtime classes:

  • kata - standard kata runtime using the QEMU hypervisor including all CoCo building blocks for a non CC HW
  • kata-clh - standard kata runtime using the cloud hypervisor including all CoCo building blocks for a non CC HW
  • kata-clh-tdx - using the Cloud Hypervisor, with TD-Shim, and support for Intel TDX CC HW
  • kata-qemu - same as kata
  • kata-qemu-tdx - using QEMU, with TDVF, and support for Intel TDX CC HW, prepared for using Verdictd and EAA KBC.
  • kata-qemu-sev - using QEMU, and support for AMD SEV HW

For the process based CoCo TEE (aka. enclave-cc) the operator setup steps are the same and the custom resources can be deployed using either

kubectl apply -k github.com/confidential-containers/operator/config/samples/enclave-cc/sim?ref=<RELEASE_VERSION>

or

kubectl apply -k github.com/confidential-containers/operator/config/samples/enclave-cc/hw?ref=<RELEASE_VERSION>

for the simulated SGX mode build or hardware SGX mode build, respectively.

These result in a RuntimeClass as follows:

kubectl get runtimeclass

Output:

NAME            HANDLER         AGE
enclave-cc      enclave-cc      9m55s

Configuring enclave-cc custom resource to use a different KBC

Note The KBC configuration changes to the enclave-cc custom resource yaml must be made before deploying it.

Enclave CC supports Verdictd and in order to use it, users will have to properly configure a decrypt_config.conf, in order to set the KBC (sample_kbc or eaa_kbc) IP,PORT, and the SECURITY_VALIDATE (false or true)

{
    "key_provider": "provider:attestation-agent:KBC::IP:PORT",
    "security_validate": SECURITY_VALIDATE
}

Once that's set according to the users needs, the user will then have to run: cat decrypt_config.conf | base64 -w 0 in order to get the data encoded and set it accordingly here.

Running a workload

Creating a sample CoCo workload

Once you've used the operator to install Confidential Containers, you can run a pod with CoCo by simply adding a runtime class. First, we will use the kata runtime class which uses CoCo without hardware support. Initially we will try this with an unencrypted container image.

In our example we will be using the bitnami/nginx image as described in the following yaml:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  labels:
    run: nginx
  name: nginx
spec:
  containers:
  - image: bitnami/nginx:1.22.0
    name: nginx
  dnsPolicy: ClusterFirst
  runtimeClassName: kata

With Confidential Containers, the workload container images are never downloaded on the host. For verifying that the container image doesnt exist on the host you should log into the k8s node and ensure the following command returns an empty result:

root@cluster01-master-0:/home/ubuntu# crictl  -r  unix:///run/containerd/containerd.sock image ls | grep bitnami/nginx

You will run this command again after the container has started.

Create a pod YAML file as previously described (we named it nginx.yaml) .

Create the workload:

kubectl apply -f nginx.yaml

Output:

pod/nginx created

Ensure the pod was created successfully (in running state):

kubectl get pods

Output:

NAME    READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
nginx   1/1     Running   0          3m50s

Now go back to the k8s node and ensure that you still dont have any bitnami/nginx images on it:

root@cluster01-master-0:/home/ubuntu# crictl  -r  unix:///run/containerd/containerd.sock image ls | grep bitnami/nginx

Creating a sample CoCo workload using enclave-cc

Following the previous example that used the kata runtime class, we setup a sample hello world workload with an encrypted and cosign signed container image using the enclave-cc runtime class for process based TEEs. The deployment below assumes the hardware SGX mode build is installed by the operator. To try on a non-TEE system, please use simulate SGX mode build.

The example uses a trivial hello world C application:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: enclave-cc-pod
spec:
  containers:
  - image: docker.io/eqmcc/helloworld_enc
    name: hello-world
    workingDir: "/run/rune/boot_instance/"
    resources:
      limits:
        sgx.intel.com/epc: 600Mi
    env:
    - name: OCCLUM_RELEASE_ENCLAVE
      value: "1"
    command:
    - /run/rune/boot_instance/build/bin/occlum-run
    - /bin/hello_world
  runtimeClassName: enclave-cc

Note When the hardware SGX mode payload is used in an SGX enabled cluster, sgx.intel.com/epc: 600Mi resource request must be added to the pod spec.

Again, create a pod YAML file as previously described (this time we named it enclave-cc-pod.yaml) .

Create the workload:

kubectl apply -f enclave-cc-pod.yaml

Output:

pod/enclave-cc-pod created

Ensure the pod was created successfully (in running state):

kubectl get pods

Output:

NAME                 READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
enclave-cc-pod   1/1     Running   0          22s

Check the pod is running as expected:

kubectl logs enclave-cc-pod | head -5

Output:

["init"]
Hello world!

Hello world!

We can also verify the host does not have the image for others to use:

crictl -r unix:///run/containerd/containerd.sock image ls | grep helloworld_enc

Creating a CoCo workload using a pre-existing encrypted image

We will now proceed to download and run a sample encrypted container image using the CoCo building blocks.

A demo container image is provided at docker.io/katadocker/ccv0-ssh. It is encrypted with Attestation Agent's offline file system key broker and aa-offline_fs_kbc-keys.json as its key file.

We have prepared a sample CoCo operator custom resource that is based on the standard ccruntime.yaml, but in addition has the the decryption keys and configuration required to decrypt this sample container image.

Note

All pods started with this sample resource will be able to decrypt the sample container and all keys shown are for demo purposes only and should not be used in production.

To test out creating a workload from the sample encrypted container image, we can take the following steps:

Swap out the standard custom resource for our sample

Support for multiple custom resources in not available in the current release. Consequently, if a custom resource already exists, then you'll need to remove it first before deploying a new one. We can remove the standard custom resource with:

kubectl delete -k github.com/confidential-containers/operator/config/samples/ccruntime/<CCRUNTIME_OVERLAY>?ref=<RELEASE_VERSION>

and in it's place install the modified version with the sample container's decryption key:

kubectl apply -k github.com/confidential-containers/operator/config/samples/ccruntime/ssh-demo?ref=<RELEASE_VERSION>

Wait until each pod has the STATUS of Running.

kubectl get pods -n confidential-containers-system --watch

Test creating a workload from the sample encrypted image

Create a new Kubernetes deployment that uses the docker.io/katadocker/ccv0-ssh container image with:

cat << EOF > ccv0-ssh-demo.yaml
kind: Service
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: ccv0-ssh
spec:
  selector:
    app: ccv0-ssh
  ports:
  - port: 22
---
kind: Deployment
apiVersion: apps/v1
metadata:
  name: ccv0-ssh
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: ccv0-ssh
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: ccv0-ssh
    spec:
      runtimeClassName: kata
      containers:
      - name: ccv0-ssh
        image: docker.io/katadocker/ccv0-ssh
        imagePullPolicy: Always
EOF

Apply this with:

kubectl apply -f ccv0-ssh-demo.yaml

and waiting for the pod to start. This process should show that we are able to pull the encrypted image and using the decryption key configured in the CoCo sample guest image decrypt the container image and create a workload using it.

The demo image has an SSH host key embedded in it, which is protected by it's encryption, but we can download the sample private key and use this to ssh into the container and validate the host key to ensure that it hasn't been tampered with.

Download the SSH key with:

curl -Lo ccv0-ssh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/confidential-containers/documentation/main/demos/ssh-demo/ccv0-ssh

Ensure that the permissions are set correctly with:

chmod 600 ccv0-ssh

We can then use the key to ssh into the container:

$ ssh -i ccv0-ssh root@$(kubectl get service ccv0-ssh -o jsonpath="{.spec.clusterIP}")

You will be prompted about whether the host key fingerprint is correct. This fingerprint should match the one specified in the container image: wK7uOpqpYQczcgV00fGCh+X97sJL3f6G1Ku4rvlwtR0.

Building an encrypted container image and deploying it as a CoCo workload on CC HW

For running one of the sample workloads provided in the previous step, but now taking advantage of a specific TEE vendor, the user will have to set the runtime class of the workload accordingly in the workload yaml file.

TDX

In case the user wants to run the workload on a TDX capable hardware, using QEMU (which uses TDVF as its firmware) the kata-qemu-tdx runtime class must be specified. In case the user prefers using Cloud Hypervisor (which uses TD-Shim as its firmware) then the kata-clh-tdx runtime class must be specified.

You can use EAA Verdictd to do that, refer to Verdictd guide.

SEV

The kata-qemu-sev runtime class must be specified.

Now you can use simple-kbs to create encrypted container image and depolying it on SEV. Please refer to sev-guide.md

Trusted Ephemeral Storage for container images

With CoCo, container images are pulled inside the guest VM. By default container images are saved in guest memory which is protected by CC hardware. Since memory is an expensive resource, CoCo implemented trusted ephemeral storage for container image and RW layer.

This solution is verified with Kubernetes CSI driver open-local. Please follow this user guide to install open-local.

We can use following example trusted_store_cc.yaml to have a try:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: trusted-lvm-block
spec:
  runtimeClassName: kata-qemu-tdx
  containers:
   - name: sidecar-trusted-store
     image: pause
     volumeDevices:
     - devicePath: "/dev/trusted_store"
       name: trusted-store
   - name: application
     image: busybox
     command:
     - sh
     - "-c"
     - |
         sleep 10000
  volumes:
   - name: trusted-store
     persistentVolumeClaim:
       claimName: trusted-store-block-pvc
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: trusted-store-block-pvc
spec:
  volumeMode: Block
  accessModes:
  - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 1Gi
  storageClassName: open-local-lvm

Before deploy the workload, we can follow this documentation and use ccv0.sh to enable CoCo console debug(optional, check whether working as expected).

Create the workload:

kubectl apply -f trusted_store_cc.yaml

Ensure the pod was created successfully (in running state):

kubectl get pods

Output:

NAME                READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
trusted-lvm-block   2/2     Running   0          31s

After we enable the debug option, we can login into the VM with ccv0.sh script:

./ccv0.sh -d open_kata_shell

Check container image is saved in encrypted storage with following commands:

root@localhost:/# lsblk --fs
NAME                             FSTYPE LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINT
sda
└─ephemeral_image_encrypted_disk                      906M     0% /run/image

root@localhost:/# cryptsetup status ephemeral_image_encrypted_disk
/dev/mapper/ephemeral_image_encrypted_disk is active and is in use.
  type:    LUKS2
  cipher:  aes-xts-plain64
  keysize: 512 bits
  key location: dm-crypt
  device:  /dev/sda
  sector size:  4096
  offset:  32768 sectors
  size:    2064384 sectors
  mode:    read/write

root@localhost:/# mount|grep image
/dev/mapper/ephemeral_image_encrypted_disk on /run/image type ext4 (rw,relatime)

root@localhost:/# ls /run/image/
layers  lost+found  overlay

Troubleshooting

Confidential Containers integrates several components. If you run into problems, it can sometimes be difficult to figure out what is going on or how to move forward. Here are some tips.

If you get stuck or find a bug, please make an issue on this repository or the repository for the component in question, e.g., the operator.

Kubernetes

To figure out which basic area you problem is in, first make sure that your Kubernetes cluster can schedule non-confidential workloads on your worker node. Remove the kata-* runtime class from your pod yaml and try to run a pod. If your pod still doesn't run, please refer to a more general Kubernetes troubleshooting guide.

If your cluster is healthy but you cannot start confidential containers, you might be able get some helpful information from Kubernetes. Try kubectl describe pod <your-pod> Sometimes this will give you a useful message pointing to a failed attestation or some sort of missing environment setup. Most of the time you will see a generic message such as the following:

Failed to create pod sandbox: rpc error: code = Unknown desc = failed to create containerd task: failed to create shim: Failed to Check if grpc server is working: rpc error: code = DeadlineExceeded desc = timed out connecting to vsock 637456061:1024: unknown

Unfortunately this is a generic message. You'll need to go deeper to figure out what is going on.

CoCo Debugging

A good next step is to figure out if things are breaking before or after the VM boots. You can see if there is a hypervisor process running with something like this.

ps -ef | grep qemu

If you are using a different hypervisor, adjust command accordingly. If there are no hypervisor processes running on the worker node, the VM has either failed to start or was shutdown. If there is a hypervisor process, the problem is probably inside the guest.

Now is a good time to enable debug output for Kata and containerd. To do this, first look at the containerd config file located at /etc/containerd/config.toml. At the bottom of the file there should be a section for each runtime class. For example:

[plugins."io.containerd.grpc.v1.cri".containerd.runtimes.kata-qemu-sev]
  cri_handler = "cc"
  runtime_type = "io.containerd.kata-qemu-sev.v2"
  privileged_without_host_devices = true
  pod_annotations = ["io.katacontainers.*"]
  [plugins."io.containerd.grpc.v1.cri".containerd.runtimes.kata-qemu-sev.options]
    ConfigPath = "/opt/confidential-containers/share/defaults/kata-containers/configuration-qemu-sev.toml"

The ConfigPath entry on the final line shows the path to the Kata configuration file that will be used for that runtime class.

While you are looking at the containerd config, find the [debug] section near the top and set level to debug. Make sure to restart containerd after editing the containerd config file. You can do this with sudo systemctl restart containerd.

Now go to the Kata config file that matches your runtime class and enable every debug option available. You do not need to restart any daemons when changing the Kata config file; just run another pod or hope that Kubernetes restarts your existing pod. Note that enabling debug options in the Kata config file can change the attestation evidence of a confidential guest.

Now you should be able to view logs from containerd with the following:

sudo journalctl -xeu containerd

Kata writes many messages to this log. It's good to know what you're looking for. There are many generic messages that are not significant, often arising from a VM not shutting down cleanly after an unrelated issue.

VM Doesn't Start

If the VM has failed to start, you might have a problem with confidential computing support on your worker node. Make sure that you can start confidential VMs without confidential containers.

Check the containerd log for any obvious errors regarding VM boot. Try searching the log for the string error or for the name of your hypervisor i.e. qemu or qemu-system-x86_64.

If there are no obvious errors, try finding the hypervisor commandline. This should be in the containerd log if you have enabled debug messages correctly.

It might be tempting to try running the hypervisor command directly from the command line, but this usually isn't productive. Instead, try starting a standalone VM using the same kernel, initrd/disk, command line, firmware, and hypervisor that Kata uses. This might uncover some kind of system misconfiguration. You can also find these values in the Kata config file, but looking in the log is more direct.

Another way to print the hypervisor command is to create a bash script that prints any arguments it is called with to a file. Then modify the Kata config file so that the hypervisor path points to this scipt rather than to the hypervisor. This method can also be used to add additional parameters to the command line. Just have the bash script call the hypervisor with whatever arguments it received plus any that you want to add. This could be useful for enabling debugging or tracing flags in your hypervisor. For instance, if you are using QEMU and SEV you might want to add the argument --trace 'kvm_sev_*'. Make sure that QEMU was built with an appropriate tracing backend.

VM Does Start

If the VM does start, search the containerd log for the string vmconsole. This will show you any guest serial output. You might see some errors coming from the kernel as the guest tries to boot. You might also see the Kata agent starting. If the Kata agent has started, you can match the output to the source to get some clues about what is happening. You might also see something more obvious, like a panic coming from the Kata agent.

failed to create shim task: failed to mount "/run/kata-containers/shared/containers/CONTAINER_NAME/rootfs"

If your CoCo Pod gets an error like showed below then it is likely the image pull policy is set to IfNotPresent and the image has been found in the kubelet cache. It fails because the container runtime will not delegate to the Kata agent to pull the image inside the VM and the agent in turn will try to mount the bundle rootfs that only exist in the host filesystem.

Therefore, you must ensure that the image pull policy is set to Always for any CoCo Pod. This ways the images are always handled entirely by the agent inside the VM. Worth mentioning we recognize that this behavior is suboptimal and so the community has worked on solutions to avoid constant images downloads for each and every workload.

Events:
  Type     Reason     Age               From               Message
  ----     ------     ----              ----               -------
  Normal   Scheduled  20s               default-scheduler  Successfully assigned default/coco-fedora-69d9f84cd7-j597j to virtlab1012
  Normal   Pulled     5s (x3 over 19s)  kubelet            Container image "docker.io/wainersm/coco-fedora_sshd@sha256:a7108f9f0080c429beb66e2cf0abff143c9eb9c7cf4dcde3241bc56c938d33b9" already present on machine
  Normal   Created    5s (x3 over 19s)  kubelet            Created container coco-fedora
  Warning  Failed     5s (x3 over 19s)  kubelet            Error: failed to create containerd task: failed to create shim task: failed to mount "/run/kata-containers/shared/containers/coco-fedora/rootfs" to "/run/kata-containers/coco-fedora/rootfs", with error: ENOENT: No such file or directory: unknown
  Warning  BackOff    4s (x3 over 18s)  kubelet            Back-off restarting failed container

Debug Console

One very useful deugging tool is the Kata guest debug console. You can enable this by editing the Kata agent configuration file and adding the lines

debug_console = true
debug_console_vport = 1026

Enabling the debug console via the Kata Configuration file will overwrite any settings in the agent configuration file in the guest initrd. Enabling the debug console will change the launch measurement.

Once you've started a pod with the new configuration, get the id of the pod you want to access. Do this via ps -ef | grep qemu or equivalent. The id is the long id that shows up in many different arguments. It should look like 1a9ab65be63b8b03dfd0c75036d27f0ed09eab38abb45337fea83acd3cd7bacd. Once you have the id, you can use it to access the debug console.

sudo /opt/confidential-containers/bin/kata-runtime exec <id>

You might need to symlink the appropriate Kata configuration file for your runtime class if the kata-runtime tries to look at the wrong one.

The debug console gives you access to the guest VM. This is a great way to investigate missing dependencies or incorrect configurations.

Guest Firmware Logs

If the VM is running but there is no guest output in the log, the guest might have stalled in the firmware. Firmware output will depend on your firmware and hypervisor. If you are using QEMU and OVMF, you can see the OVMF output by adding -global isa-debugcon.iobase=0x402 and -debugcon file:/tmp/ovmf.log to the QEMU command line using the redirect script described above.