Shielded but Lightweight: Building Practical Confidential Containers with ARM CCA

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26018v1
• Date: Mon, 25 May 2026 16:36:28 GMT
• Title: Shielded but Lightweight: Building Practical Confidential Containers with ARM CCA
• Abstract summary: Existing confidential container designs mainly adopt a microVM-based architecture.<n>Fasco is a lightweight confidential container runtime based on the ARM Confidential Compute Architecture.
• Score: 17.873589077067532
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: The rapid advancement of cloud-native technologies has created an urgent need for security. Currently, confidential containers are increasingly deployed in multi-tenant environments. Existing confidential container designs mainly adopt a microVM-based architecture. Although this approach improves inter-container isolation, its complex software stack leads to high startup latency and significant resource overhead, making it unsuitable for short-lived container workloads. In this paper, we propose Fasco, a lightweight confidential container runtime based on the ARM Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA). Fasco directly instantiates each container as an independent Container Realm, leveraging CCA's hardware-enforced isolation to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of application data inside the container. In addition, Fasco introduces a dedicated System Realm to provide system services and resource management for container realms. Through exception forwarding and shared buffers, Fasco ensures isolation among different container realms. We have implemented a prototype of Fasco and evaluated its performance on ARMv8 hardware. Experimental results show that Fasco reduces the startup latency and performance overhead of existing confidential container architectures while maintaining a small TCB.

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