NACRE: Rethinking Confidential Containers through Native Architectural Support

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03849v1
• Date: Thu, 03 Sep 2026 13:42:11 GMT
• Title: NACRE: Rethinking Confidential Containers through Native Architectural Support
• Abstract summary: Linux containers achieve high density and fast lifecycle operations by sharing the host kernel.<n>This paper presents NACRE, a hardware-software co-design for native confidential containers.
• Score: 10.992896257876362
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Linux containers achieve high density and fast lifecycle operations by sharing the host kernel, but this design also lets a compromised host inspect or modify container state. Existing confidential-computing systems protect an enclave address space or an entire guest operating system, while recent container-granularity systems still add a separate protection context. These abstractions do not make a dynamic group of host-managed Linux processes the architectural protection unit. This paper presents NACRE, a RISC-V hardware-software co-design for native confidential containers. Its key insight is to separate the host's authority to manage resources from its authority to access or commit protected state. Hardware-recognized container identities direct protected traps to an isolated S-mode agent, while an M-mode monitor commits security- sensitive identity, mapping, and page transitions. The agent delegates services to host Linux without changing satp; services that neither access private bytes nor modify protected state also avoid M-mode. We prototype NACRE by extending QEMU, OpenSBI, Linux, a trusted agent, and runc. The prototype implements the single-container private-memory substrate and covered launch, fault, fork/COW, user-access, and teardown paths. Across five lmbench syscall and pipe metrics, the three-run means remain within 3.5% of the runc-origin baseline. With the eight nginx object-size means weighted equally, aggregate throughput is 1.9% lower.

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