CoCoTPM: Trusted Platform Modules for Virtual Machines in Confidential Computing Environments
Joana Pecholt, Sascha Wessel
Abstract
Cloud computing has gained popularity and is increasingly used to process sensitive and valuable data. This development necessitates the protection of data from the cloud provider and results in a trend towards confidential computing. Hardware-based technologies by AMD, Intel and Arm address this and allow the protection of virtual machines and the data processed in them. Unfortunately, these hardware-based technologies do not offer a unified interface for necessary tasks like secure key generation and usage or secure storage of integrity measurements. Moreover, these technologies are oftentimes limited in functionality especially regarding remote attestation. On the other hand, a unified interface is widely used in the area of bare-metal systems to provide these functionalities: the Trusted Platform Module (TPM).