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Production Host Setup Recommendations

Host Security Configuration

Mitigating Side-Channel Issues

When deploying Firecracker microVMs to handle multi-tenant workloads, the following host environment configurations are strongly recommended to guard against side-channel security issues.

Disable Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT)

Disabling SMT will help mitigate side-channels issues between sibling threads on the same physical core.

SMT can be disabled by adding the following Kernel boot parameter to the host:

nosmt=force

Verification can be done by running:

(grep -q "^forceoff$\|^notsupported$" /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control && echo "Hyperthreading: DISABLED") || echo "Hyperthreading: ENABLED"

Check Kernel Page-Table Isolation (KPTI) support

KPTI is used to prevent certain side-channel issues that allow access to protected kernel memory pages that are normally inaccessible to guests. Some variants of Meltdown can be mitigated by enabling this feature.

Verification can be done by running:

(grep -q "^Mitigation: PTI$" /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/meltdown && echo "KPTI: SUPPORTED") || echo "KPTI: NOT SUPPORTED"

Disable Kernel Same-page Merging (KSM)

Disabling KSM mitigates side-channel issues which rely on de-duplication to reveal what memory line was accessed by another process.

KSM can be disabled by executing the following as root:

echo "0" > /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/run

Verification can be done by running:

(grep -q "^0$" /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/run && echo "KSM: DISABLED") || echo "KSM: ENABLED"

Check for speculative branch prediction issue mitigation

Use a kernel compiled with retpoline and run on hardware with microcode supporting Indirect Branch Prediction Barriers (IBPB) and Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS).

These features provide side-channel mitigation for variants of Spectre such as the Branch Target Injection variant.

Verification can be done by running:

(grep -q "^Mitigation: Full generic retpoline, IBPB, IBRS_FW$" /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/spectre_v2 && echo "retpoline, IBPB, IBRS: ENABLED") || echo "retpoline, IBPB, IBRS: DISABLED"

Apply L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF) mitigation

These features provide mitigation for Foreshadow/L1TF side-channel issue on affected hardware.

They can be enabled by adding the following Linux kernel boot parameter:

l1tf=full,force

which will also implicitly disable SMT. This will apply the mitigation when execution context switches into microVMs.

Verification can be done by running:

declare -a CONDITIONS=("Mitigation: PTE Inversion" "VMX: cache flushes")
for cond in "${CONDITIONS[@]}"; do (grep -q "$cond" /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/l1tf && echo "$cond: ENABLED") || echo "$cond: DISABLED"; done

Apply Speculative Store Bypass (SSBD) mitigation

This will mitigate variants of Spectre side-channel issues such as Speculative Store Bypass and SpectreNG.

It can be enabled by adding the following Linux kernel boot parameter:

spec_store_bypass_disable=seccomp

which will apply SSB if seccomp is enabled by Firecracker's jailer.

Verification can be done by running:

cat /proc/*PID*/status | grep Speculation_Store_Bypass

where PID is the process ID being check. Output shows one of the following:

  • not vulnerable
  • thread mitigated
  • thread force mitigated
  • globally mitigated

Use memory with Rowhammer mitigation support

Rowhammer is a memory side-channel issue that can lead to unauthorized cross- process memory changes.

Using DDR4 memory that supports Target Row Refresh (TRR) with error-correcting code (ECC) is recommended. Use of pseudo target row refresh (pTRR) for systems with pTRR-compliant DDR3 memory can help mitigate the issue, but it also incurs a performance penalty.

Disable swapping to disk or enable secure swap

Memory pressure on a host can cause memory to be written to drive storage when swapping is enabled. Disabling swap mitigates data remanence issues related to having guest memory contents on microVM storage devices.

Verify that swap is disabled by running:

cat /proc/swaps

The output should not show any swap partition.