Attestation

Attestation is a process that starts by default at virtual instance creation, ensures that the virtual server instance image is indeed built by IBM, and that it was not modified. This process also provides information and allows validation of any data that is provided to the instance at the time of deployment.

When you create a virtual server instance by using the IBM Hyper Protect Container Runtime image, the image uses an initial file system that is protected by encryption and signed by IBM Secure Execution. For more information, see Confidential computing with LinuxONE. To know more about the attestation process, see this video.

The boot process creates a unique root disk encryption key to ensure protection of the root disk. To perform attestation, the virtual server instance image contains an attestation-signing key and the hash of the root partition at build time. The boot process validates the root partition. If the hash of the root partition does not match, the boot process does not continue because it assumes that the image was modified before boot. The attestation signing key is a random RSA 4 K key that is signed by an IBM root key that is maintained in Hyper Protect Crypto Services. The IBM root key is signed by Digicert.

During deployment of the virtual server instance in the cloud, an attestation record is created. It contains hashes of the following items:

• The original base image
• The root partition at the moment of the first boot
• The root partition at build time
• The cloud initialization options

The attestation record is signed by the attestation key. As an extra protection layer, you can provide a public key during deployment, against which the attestation record is encrypted. The hash of this public key is added to the attestation record to ensure that the record can be viewed only by the compliance authority, and the expected authority can be easily identified through that hash.

Before you upload any workload to your instance, you need to validate the attestation record. After an instance is created, you can validate the attestation record within the created instance. Your instance must have access to the /var/hyperprotect directory. If so, follow these procedures:

• The attestation record is signed by the attestation signing key.
• The attestation signing key can be confirmed by the IBM intermediate certificate. The IBM intermediate certificate is signed by DigiCert, which is proven by the root certificate of DigiCert, thus completing the chain of trust.

The encryption and attestation certificates are signed by the IBM intermediate certificate and this has been signed by the IBM Digicert intermediate cert (which in turn is signed by DigiCert Trusted Root G4). For more information about the certificates, see DigiCert Trusted Root Authority Certificates.

Use the following procedure to validate the attestation record and hashes:

• Obtain the attestation record se-checksums.txt and the signature file se-signature.bin from your Hyper Protect Virtual Servers for VPC instance. To do so, you can implement your container to provide the attestation record and the signature file. The attestation record and the signature file are made available to your container in the /var/hyperprotect directory.

• Get the IBM attestation certificate. The following table lists the expiry dates for the attestation certificates based on the version of the image.

  Attestation certificate expiry dates

  Image version	Certificate link	Expiry date
  ibm-hyper-protect-container-runtime-1-0-s390x-22	certificate	21 March 2026
  ibm-hyper-protect-container-runtime-1-0-s390x-21	certificate	04 March 2026
  ibm-hyper-protect-container-runtime-1-0-s390x-20	certificate	20 November 2025
  ibm-hyper-protect-container-runtime-1-0-s390x-19	certificate	19 September 2025
  ibm-hyper-protect-container-runtime-1-0-s390x-18	certificate	01 August 2025
  ibm-hyper-protect-container-runtime-1-0-s390x-17	certificate	04 July 2025

• Validate the attestation certificate by following the instructions here.

• Extract the encryption public key from the encryption certificate by using the following command:

  openssl x509 -pubkey -noout -in ibm-hyper-protect-container-runtime-1-0-s390x-22-attestation.crt > contract-public-key.pub
  

• Verify the signature of the attestation record:

  openssl sha256 -verify contract-public-key.pub -signature se-signature.bin se-checksums.txt
  

  Signature verification must be done on a decrypted attestation file.

• You can now use the hashes from the attestation record for validation.

In case you provided a public key for encrypting the attestation record, the following script might help in decrypting the record.

#!/bin/bash
#
# Example script to decrypt attestation document.
#
# Usage:
#   ./decrypt-attestation.sh <rsa-priv-key.pem> [file]
#
# Token Format:
#   hyper-protect-basic.<ENC_AES_KEY_BASE64>.<ENC_MESSAGE_BASE64>


RSA_PRIV_KEY="$1"
if [ -z "$RSA_PRIV_KEY" ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 <rsa-priv-key.pem>"
    exit 1
fi
INPUT_FILE="${2:-se-checksums.txt.enc}"
TMP_DIR="$(mktemp -d)"
#trap 'rm -r $TMP_DIR' EXIT


PASSWORD_ENC="${TMP_DIR}/password_enc"
MESSAGE_ENC="${TMP_DIR}/message_enc"


# extract encrypted AES key and encrypted message
cut -d. -f 2 "$INPUT_FILE"| base64 -d > "$PASSWORD_ENC"
cut -d. -f 3 "$INPUT_FILE"| base64 -d > "$MESSAGE_ENC"

# decrypt password
PASSWORD=$(openssl pkeyutl -decrypt -inkey "$RSA_PRIV_KEY" -in "$PASSWORD_ENC")

# decrypt message
echo -n "$PASSWORD" | openssl aes-256-cbc -d -pbkdf2 -in "$MESSAGE_ENC" -pass stdin --out se-checksums.txt

In the case of a docker container, the decrypt-attestation.sh file can be accessed by mounting /var/hyperprotect in the docker container. For example,

 volumes:
      - "/var/hyperprotect/:/var/hyperprotect/:ro"

In the case of a Podman container, the decrypt-attestation.sh file can be accessed by mounting /var/hyperprotect in the Podman container. For example,

 volumeMounts:
     - name: attestation
       readOnly: true
       mountPath: /var/hyperprotect:Z,U

/var/hyperprotect/
|-- cidata
|   |-- meta-data
|   |-- vendor-data
|-- se-checksums.txt
|-- se-signature.bin
|-- se-version
|-- user-data.decrypted

sha256sum <file>

25.3.1
Machine Type/Plant/Serial: 3932/02/8A018
Image age: 3 days since creation.
ff09f53f19d0f82ca24d4f2d5277c851516734c3d55ae7f8db47cde378a51ec9 root.tar.gz
538170f79b7bd44553847e81afce7ae14c8ea8857df243e4f8656c9d06d42c18 baseimage
6d8d29792e3269d0d917f6a6e51d73cc82894f798d1b3d7b23f9db55e2d079b8 /dev/disk/by-label/cidata
b65133a86e74ba813ee3e30f260d375c366194d00876b1454d2835c11b9a0c7b cidata/meta-data
2a4f4ffa5fdff5886de052da47e3839347649fbb4ba657a1be3bd3a22e4f9a22 cidata/user-data
5a2b8897d00e4f03436494a36304776a637bf3f134ae10107f2a47e9859ed0fb cidata/vendor-data
1a16d9d7632f991eb5e4d8bb0e003a57ea643c15b311b9631d408a6e61b409a8 contract:attestationPublicKey 
15649f26816df8f663b38b31a59b816ca817313d7418e60f76179322169d7c7d contract:env 
ed5beb01e278296b29043523b92cbdead2b14dd26b908116da2ab0d58544333c contract:workload

538170f79b7bd44553847e81afce7ae14c8ea8857df243e4f8656c9d06d42c18 baseimage

538170f79b7bd44553847e81afce7ae14c8ea8857df243e4f8656c9d06d42c18 baseimage

080f817231fe4bc40021d24e20af9f1135a36711047212f9374664b86ab406ac baseimage

b3fb54a3bb57fcbba070c456d7394fb5e7a4f9b1febaec0efc32c5aa0e325071 baseimage

f9940321d043d133ddf2f22cd4794bc56be9d54b2e9c7893a6d6a4813635024c baseimage

f9940321d043d133ddf2f22cd4794bc56be9d54b2e9c7893a6d6a4813635024c baseimage

ff09f53f19d0f82ca24d4f2d5277c851516734c3d55ae7f8db47cde378a51ec9 root.tar.gz

024ff109be23e1e4e7b9f07dc553afc60a5a93645939eedf2a936930cc8a44ae root.tar.gz

ad65a3820d4a233c84e6d201ce537b8020435ccefe26682809da5ef9b176b8ae root.tar.gz

d8e069345618143ce0948044cab27ba52ffc53eaba987d353bb5ab59f3ad2390 root.tar.gz

4802242b82dce78d11c4b02129a9b9c1e62598b1cb8073f8e7b097449644bbb4 root.tar.gz

4802242b82dce78d11c4b02129a9b9c1e62598b1cb8073f8e7b097449644bbb4 root.tar.gz

b65133a86e74ba813ee3e30f260d375c366194d00876b1454d2835c11b9a0c7b cidata/meta-data
2a4f4ffa5fdff5886de052da47e3839347649fbb4ba657a1be3bd3a22e4f9a22 cidata/user-data
5a2b8897d00e4f03436494a36304776a637bf3f134ae10107f2a47e9859ed0fb cidata/vendor-data

1a16d9d7632f991eb5e4d8bb0e003a57ea643c15b311b9631d408a6e61b409a8 contract:attestationPublicKey

 volumes:
      - "/var/hyperprotect/:/var/hyperprotect/:ro"

 volumeMounts:
     - name: attestation
       readOnly: true
       mountPath: /var/hyperprotect:Z,U

Understanding attestation flows

The following diagram shows two scenarios for attestation from the point of view of the auditor to validate that the deployment is the expected one. The left side of the diagram shows the establishment of trust by the auditor who is rooted on a third-party certificate authority. Any key used is kept in a Hyper Protect Crypto Service and signed in a certificate chain based on the third-party authority. The Build environment that is used by Hyper Protect is running in a trusted execution environment by using IBM Secure Execution Technology.

The result is a secure execution image that is seen at the end of the diagram, which is an encrypted secure execution image. To the right of the diagram, the validation of the deployment is outlined. For this, the auditor includes into the encrypted workload contract of the IBM Hyper Protect instance, the public key of a secret, which only the auditor has control over. Such secrets might be protected by appropriate means, like a Hyper Protect Crypto Service, HSM or just a random key. Only the Hyper Protect bootloader that is executed in the trusted execution environment provided through IBM Secure Execution for Linux on IBM LinuxONE, can run the secure execution image of IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Virtual Servers for IBM Cloud® Virtual Private Cloud. The bootloader contains the secret to decrypt the contract.

During boot several hashes of components and measures of code are taken and added to the attestation record. To further protect this attestation record, the record is encrypted with the public key that the auditor provided. By doing so, only the auditor is in the position to decrypt the attestation record and can validate that the workload that is deployed in the enclave is the expected and untampered version of the workload that is expected to be deployed into the Hyper Protect Virtual Servers for VPC instance.