[RFC PATCH 0/2] dm-crypt support for per-sector NVMe metadata

[Milan Broz]

On 5/28/24 12:12 AM, Eric Wheeler wrote:
> On Wed, 15 May 2024, Mikulas Patocka wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> Some NVMe devices may be formatted with extra 64 bytes of metadata per
>> sector.
>>
>> Here I'm submitting for review dm-crypt patches that make it possible to
>> use per-sector metadata for authenticated encryption. With these patches,
>> dm-crypt can run directly on the top of a NVMe device, without using
>> dm-integrity. These patches increase write throughput twice, because there
>> is no write to the dm-integrity journal.
>>
>> An example how to use it (so far, there is no support in the userspace
>> cryptsetup tool):
>>
>> # nvme format /dev/nvme1 -n 1 -lbaf=4
>> # dmsetup create cr --table '0 1048576 crypt
>> capi:authenc(hmac(sha256),cbc(aes))-essiv:sha256
>> 01b11af6b55f76424fd53fb66667c301466b2eeaf0f39fd36d26e7fc4f52ade2de4228e996f5ae2fe817ce178e77079d28e4baaebffbcd3e16ae4f36ef217298
>> 0 /dev/nvme1n1 0 2 integrity:32:aead sector_size:4096'
> 
> Thats really an amazing feature, and I think your implementation is simple
> and elegant.  Somehow reminds me of 520/528-byte sectors that big
> commercial filers use, but in a way the Linux could use.
> 
> Questions:
> 
> - I see you are using 32-bytes of AEAD data (out of 64).  Is AEAD always
>    32-bytes, or can it vary by crypto mechanism?

Hi Eric,

I'll try to answer this question as this is where we headed with dm-integrity+dm-crypt
since the beginning - replace it with HW and atomic sector+metadata handling once
suitable HW becomes available.

Currently, dm-integrity allocates exact space for any AEAD you want to construct
(cipher-xts/hctr2 + hmac) or for native AEAD (my favourite is AEGIS here).

So it depends on configuration, the only difference to dm-integrity is that HW allocates
fixed 64 bytes so that crypto can use up to this space, but it should be completely
configurable in dm-crypt. IOW real used space can vary by crypto mechanism.

Definitely, it is now enough for real AEAD compared to legacy 512+8 DIF :)

Also, it opens a way to store something more (sector context) in metadata,
but that's an idea for the future (usable in fs encryption as well, I guess).


> - What drive are you using? I am curious what your `nvme id-ns` output
>    looks like. Do you have 64 in the `ms` value?
> 
>          # nvme id-ns /dev/nvme0n1 | grep lbaf
>          nlbaf   : 0
>          nulbaf  : 0
>          lbaf  0 : ms:0   lbads:9  rp:0 (in use)
>                       ^         ^512b

This is the major issue still - I think there are only enterprisey NVMe drives that
can do this.

Milan