CAEC: Confidential, Attestable, and Efficient Inter-CVM Communication with Arm CCA
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Sina Abdollahi, Amir Al Sadi, David Kotz, Marios Kogias, and Hamed Haddadi.
CAEC: Confidential, Attestable, and Efficient Inter-CVM Communication with Arm CCA.
Proceedings of the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (Euro S&P), pages 789–803.
IEEE, July 2026.
doi:10.1109/EuroSP68448.2026.00056.
©Copyright IEEE.
Revision of abdollahi:caec-tr.
Abstract:
Confidential Virtual Machines (CVMs) are increasingly adopted to protect sensitive workloads from privileged adversaries such as the hypervisor. While they provide strong isolation guarantees, existing CVM architectures lack first-class mechanisms for inter-CVM data sharing due to their disjoint memory model, making inter-CVM data exchange a performance bottleneck in compartmentalized or collaborative multi-CVM systems. Under this model, a CVM's accessible memory is either shared with the hypervisor or protected from both the hypervisor and all other CVMs. This design simplifies reasoning about memory ownership; however, it fundamentally precludes plaintext data sharing between CVMs because all inter-CVM communication must pass through hypervisor-accessible memory, requiring costly encryption and decryption to preserve confidentiality and integrity. In this paper, we introduce CAEC, a system that enables protected memory sharing between CVMs. CAEC builds on Arm Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA) and extends its firmware to support Confidential Shared Memory (CSM), a memory region securely shared between multiple CVMs while remaining inaccessible to the hypervisor and all non-participating CVMs. CAEC's design is fully compatible with CCA hardware and introduces only a modest increase (6%) in CCA firmware code size. CAEC delivers substantial performance benefits across a range of workloads. For instance, inter-CVM communication over CAEC achieves up to 209× reduction in CPU cycles compared to encryption-based mechanisms over hypervisor-accessible shared memory. By combining high performance, strong isolation guarantees, and attestable sharing semantics, CAEC provides a practical and scalable foundation for the next generation of trusted multi-CVM services across both edge and cloud environments.
Citable with [BibTeX]: \cite{abdollahi:caec} Projects: [splice] Keywords: [agents] [privacy] [security] Available from the publisher: [DOI] Available from the author:
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Notes:See this webpage for the CAEC paper and code: https://caec-paper.github.io/. |
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