AgenTEE: Confidential LLM Agent Execution on Edge Devices

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Abdollahi, Sina, Maheri, Mohammad M, Forough, Javad, Sadi, Amir Al, Millar, Josh, Kotz, David, Kogias, Marios, Haddadi, Hamed
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866913093032869888
author Abdollahi, Sina
Maheri, Mohammad M
Forough, Javad
Sadi, Amir Al
Millar, Josh
Kotz, David
Kogias, Marios
Haddadi, Hamed
author_facet Abdollahi, Sina
Maheri, Mohammad M
Forough, Javad
Sadi, Amir Al
Millar, Josh
Kotz, David
Kogias, Marios
Haddadi, Hamed
contents Large Language Model (LLM) agents provide powerful automation capabilities, but they also create a substantially broader attack surface than traditional applications due to their tight integration with non-deterministic models and third-party services. While current deployments primarily rely on cloud-hosted services, emerging designs increasingly execute agents directly on edge devices to reduce latency and enhance user privacy. However, securely hosting such complex agent pipelines on edge devices remains challenging. These deployments must protect proprietary assets (e.g., system prompts and model weights) and sensitive runtime state on heterogeneous platforms that are vulnerable to software attacks and potentially controlled by malicious users. To address these challenges, we present AgenTEE, a system for deploying confidential agent pipelines on edge devices. AgenTEE places the agent runtime, inference engine, and third-party applications into independently attested confidential virtual machines (cVMs) and mediates their interaction through explicit, verifiable communication channels. Built on Arm Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA), a recent extension to Arm platforms, AgenTEE enforces strong system-level isolation of sensitive assets and runtime state. Our evaluation shows that such multi-cVMs system is practical, achieving near-native performance with less than 5.15% runtime overhead compared to commodity OS multi-process deployments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_18231
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AgenTEE: Confidential LLM Agent Execution on Edge Devices
Abdollahi, Sina
Maheri, Mohammad M
Forough, Javad
Sadi, Amir Al
Millar, Josh
Kotz, David
Kogias, Marios
Haddadi, Hamed
Cryptography and Security
Operating Systems
Large Language Model (LLM) agents provide powerful automation capabilities, but they also create a substantially broader attack surface than traditional applications due to their tight integration with non-deterministic models and third-party services. While current deployments primarily rely on cloud-hosted services, emerging designs increasingly execute agents directly on edge devices to reduce latency and enhance user privacy. However, securely hosting such complex agent pipelines on edge devices remains challenging. These deployments must protect proprietary assets (e.g., system prompts and model weights) and sensitive runtime state on heterogeneous platforms that are vulnerable to software attacks and potentially controlled by malicious users. To address these challenges, we present AgenTEE, a system for deploying confidential agent pipelines on edge devices. AgenTEE places the agent runtime, inference engine, and third-party applications into independently attested confidential virtual machines (cVMs) and mediates their interaction through explicit, verifiable communication channels. Built on Arm Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA), a recent extension to Arm platforms, AgenTEE enforces strong system-level isolation of sensitive assets and runtime state. Our evaluation shows that such multi-cVMs system is practical, achieving near-native performance with less than 5.15% runtime overhead compared to commodity OS multi-process deployments.
title AgenTEE: Confidential LLM Agent Execution on Edge Devices
topic Cryptography and Security
Operating Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18231