Confidential Serverless Computing

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Sabanic, Patrick, Misono, Masanori, Bodea, Teofil, Pritzi, Julian, Hackl, Michael, Stavrakakis, Dimitrios, Bhatotia, Pramod
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918124168675328
author Sabanic, Patrick
Misono, Masanori
Bodea, Teofil
Pritzi, Julian
Hackl, Michael
Stavrakakis, Dimitrios
Bhatotia, Pramod
author_facet Sabanic, Patrick
Misono, Masanori
Bodea, Teofil
Pritzi, Julian
Hackl, Michael
Stavrakakis, Dimitrios
Bhatotia, Pramod
contents Although serverless computing offers compelling cost and deployment simplicity advantages, a significant challenge remains in securely managing sensitive data as it flows through the network of ephemeral function executions in serverless computing environments within untrusted clouds. While Confidential Virtual Machines (CVMs) offer a promising secure execution environment, their integration with serverless architectures currently faces fundamental limitations in key areas: security, performance, and resource efficiency. We present WALLET, a confidential computing system for secure serverless deployments to overcome these limitations. By employing nested confidential execution and a decoupled guest OS within CVMs, WALLET runs each function in a minimal "trustlet", significantly improving security through a reduced Trusted Computing Base (TCB). Furthermore, by leveraging a data-centric I/O architecture built upon a lightweight LibOS, WALLET optimizes network communication to address performance and resource efficiency challenges. Our evaluation shows that compared to CVM-based deployments, WALLET has 4.3x smaller TCB, improves end-to-end latency (15-93%), achieves higher function density (up to 907x), and reduces inter-function communication (up to 27x) and function chaining latency (16.7-30.2x); thus, WALLET offers a practical system for confidential serverless computing.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_21518
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Confidential Serverless Computing
Sabanic, Patrick
Misono, Masanori
Bodea, Teofil
Pritzi, Julian
Hackl, Michael
Stavrakakis, Dimitrios
Bhatotia, Pramod
Cryptography and Security
Operating Systems
Although serverless computing offers compelling cost and deployment simplicity advantages, a significant challenge remains in securely managing sensitive data as it flows through the network of ephemeral function executions in serverless computing environments within untrusted clouds. While Confidential Virtual Machines (CVMs) offer a promising secure execution environment, their integration with serverless architectures currently faces fundamental limitations in key areas: security, performance, and resource efficiency. We present WALLET, a confidential computing system for secure serverless deployments to overcome these limitations. By employing nested confidential execution and a decoupled guest OS within CVMs, WALLET runs each function in a minimal "trustlet", significantly improving security through a reduced Trusted Computing Base (TCB). Furthermore, by leveraging a data-centric I/O architecture built upon a lightweight LibOS, WALLET optimizes network communication to address performance and resource efficiency challenges. Our evaluation shows that compared to CVM-based deployments, WALLET has 4.3x smaller TCB, improves end-to-end latency (15-93%), achieves higher function density (up to 907x), and reduces inter-function communication (up to 27x) and function chaining latency (16.7-30.2x); thus, WALLET offers a practical system for confidential serverless computing.
title Confidential Serverless Computing
topic Cryptography and Security
Operating Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.21518