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vmbus_serial_guest: add tx only option

Open tjones60 opened this issue 1 month ago • 6 comments

Add an option to the VMBUS serial relay that runs in OpenHCL to drop all rx traffic from the host and only allow tx traffic from the guest. This could be attested to in the future and offer a more secure way to debug a VM using the serial console, since only allowing one-way serial traffic would greatly reduce the possible attack surface. This is useful primarily for CVMs that don't have a framebuffer and are usually configured with serial disabled completely.

tjones60 avatar Nov 13 '25 00:11 tjones60

⚠️ Unsafe Code Detected

This PR modifies files containing unsafe Rust code. Extra scrutiny is required during review.

For more on why we check whole files, instead of just diffs, check out the Rustonomicon

github-actions[bot] avatar Nov 13 '25 00:11 github-actions[bot]

Why?

smalis-msft avatar Nov 13 '25 15:11 smalis-msft

Why?

This is intended to be an option for CVMs that could be attested to, so you could enable serial output for debugging purposes without allowing interactive login to reduce risk.

tjones60 avatar Nov 13 '25 18:11 tjones60

Put that in the pr description?

smalis-msft avatar Nov 13 '25 18:11 smalis-msft

    console_enabled: dps.general.com1_enabled

an additional runtime claim is needed here.

I think we agreed on something like "console-mode:serial|serialbootdiagnosticsonly"


Refers to: openhcl/underhill_core/src/worker.rs:1782 in 3d6d329. [](commit_id = 3d6d3295eb026b51fb956576d86cdc8cfc67058e, deletion_comment = False)

mebersol avatar Nov 13 '25 20:11 mebersol