Udo Steinberg
Udo Steinberg is a Fellow and Co-Founder of BlueRock Security, where he leads kernel architecture with a strong focus on Arm and x86, hardware virtualization, trusted computing, security and performance. He is also the author and maintainer of the open-source NOVA microhypervisor.
Udo studied Computer Science at TU Dresden and has more than 20 years of experience building microkernels and microkernel-based systems.
Session
NOVA is an open-source microhypervisor for x86_64 and aarch64, whose central design property is a deliberately minimal trusted computing base that implements capability-based authorization and hardware virtualization. Because small size alone does not make a TCB trustworthy, this talk is about how NOVA grounds that trust in hardware.
The core of the talk is the measurement chain. We explore DRTM via Intel TXT and the interaction between NOVA and SINIT, then how NOVA extends the TPM measurement chain into the running hypervisor and the first user-level protection domain - giving remote attestation a basis that does not depend on firmware honesty after the measured launch.
Around that foundation are two runtime isolation boundaries, which NOVA enforces at the hardware-software interface. The IOMMU constrains both DMA and interrupts: every DMA-capable device runs against a per-domain translation table, and interrupt remapping prevents a compromised device or guest from injecting arbitrary vectors. Intel TME-MK then assigns each protection domain its own memory-encryption key, so tenant isolation survives DRAM-level adversaries as well as the software-boundary mistakes that would otherwise expose cleartext memory across domains.
We close with what a small TCB buys: formal verification becomes feasible, and NOVA's specifications can be mathematically proven correct rather than only tested against. The attack classes that remain - microarchitectural channels, adversarial firmware - require complementary defenses.