Tinfoil replaces OVMF with about 300 lines of assembly
Original title: Less Is More: From 1M Lines of Firmware to 300 of Assembly
The company moved enclave boot measurement out of a million-line C firmware so an untrusted host cannot load arbitrary guest code.
Tinfoil says it replaced open-source OVMF firmware for its confidential virtual machines with about 300 lines of open-source assembly and no dependencies, deleting roughly one million lines of C. Under its threat model the host is untrusted, and firmware must measure the kernel, initramfs, and Linux command line so hardware attestation can prove what runs in the enclave. A firmware bug could let a malicious host load arbitrary software. The post argues minimal, purpose-built code is safer than large popular codebases and contrasts that with swarm-based patching.
Unconfirmed: The post asserts a network-stack vulnerability was found in OVMF this week but does not identify it.
- OVMF's specification is described as almost 3,000 pages.
- Enclave memory is encrypted by Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA hardware.
- The company cites an OVMF network-stack vulnerability found this week, without details.
- OpenAI's red-team campaign is cited as nearly 400 billion tokens, estimated at $8 to $20 million.
From the original article
14 min read at tinfoil.sh
Patching bugs does not scale anymore. New vulnerabilities are getting disclosed at an exponential rate, and it can feel like all software is getting hacked at once. At Tinfoil, we’ve been thinking hard about what we can do to create a more principled approach to hardening software systems, especially when it comes to the most important parts of our stack.
By tinfoil.sh by lothan · tinfoil.sh
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