virtCCA: Virtualized Arm Confidential Compute Architecture with TrustZone (2306.11011v2)

Abstract: ARM recently introduced the Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA) as part of the upcoming ARMv9-A architecture. CCA enables the support of confidential virtual machines (cVMs) within a separate world called the Realm world, providing protection from the untrusted normal world. While CCA offers a promising future for confidential computing, the widespread availability of CCA hardware is not expected in the near future, according to ARM's roadmap. To address this gap, we present virtCCA, an architecture that facilitates virtualized CCA using TrustZone, a mature hardware feature available on existing ARM platforms. Notably, virtCCA can be implemented on platforms equipped with the Secure EL2 (S-EL2) extension available from ARMv8.4 onwards, as well as on earlier platforms that lack S-EL2 support. virtCCA is fully compatible with the CCA specifications at the API level. We have developed the entire CCA software and firmware stack on top of virtCCA, including the enhancements to the normal world's KVM to support cVMs, and the TrustZone Management Monitor (TMM) that enforces isolation among cVMs and provides cVM life-cycle management. We have implemented virtCCA on real ARM servers, with and without S-EL2 support. Our evaluation, conducted on micro-benchmarks and macro-benchmarks, demonstrates that the overhead of running cVMs is acceptable compared to running normal-world VMs. Specifically, in a set of real-world workloads, the overhead of virtCCA-SEL2 is less than 29.5% for I/O intensive workloads, while virtCCA-EL3 outperforms the baseline in most cases.