Designing and Evaluating Live Migration of Confidential Virtual Machines for Commodity Arm CCA-Based Platforms
Journal
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Journal Volume
75
Journal Issue
5
Start Page
2050
End Page
2063
ISSN
0018-9340
1557-9956
2326-3814
Date Issued
2026-02-23
Author(s)
Abstract
Confidential virtual machines (CVMs) are increasingly deployed to protect users’ code and data in use against attackers with hypervisor privileges. Arm has recently introduced hardware extensions, the Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA), to support CVMs. However, Arm CCA does not support live migration, a crucial virtualization feature. This work presents the first design of live migration support for Arm CCA. The design aims to reuse functionality for migrating regular VMs from commodity hypervisors to simplify development efforts while preserving the protection of CVMs. We prototype the design to support de facto mechanisms, including pre-copy and post-copy, to migrate CVMs on Arm CCA. Given that no CCA hardware is currently available, we created a performance modeling framework, pCCA that mimics a CCA environment over an off-the-shelf Arm server hardware, enabling the evaluation of CCA-based CVM live migration performance for the first time.
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Type
journal article