CoVE: Towards Confidential Computing on RISC-V Platforms

Abstract: Multi-tenant computing platforms are typically comprised of several software and hardware components including platform firmware, host operating system kernel, virtualization monitor, and the actual tenant payloads that run on them (typically in a virtual machine, container, or application). This model is well established in large scale commercial deployment, but the downside is that all platform components and operators are in the Trusted Computing Base (TCB) of the tenant. This aspect is ill-suited for privacy-oriented workloads that aim to minimize the TCB footprint. Confidential computing presents a good stepping-stone towards providing a quantifiable TCB for computing. Confidential computing [1] requires the use of a HW-attested Trusted Execution Environments for data-in-use protection. The RISC-V architecture presents a strong foundation for meeting the requirements for Confidential Computing and other security paradigms in a clean slate manner. This paper describes a reference architecture and discusses ISA, non-ISA and system-on-chip (SoC) requirements for confidential computing on RISC-V Platforms. It discusses proposed ISA and non-ISA Extension for Confidential Virtual Machine for RISC-V platforms, referred to as CoVE.