Multi-tenant computing platforms are typically comprised of several software and hardware components including platform firmware, host operating system kernel, virtualization monitor, and the actual tenant payloads that run on them (typically in a virtual machine, container, or application). This model is well established in large scale commercial deployment, but the downside is that all platform components and operators are in the Trusted Computing Base (TCB) of the tenant. This aspect is ill-suited for privacy-oriented workloads that aim to minimize the TCB footprint. Confidential computing presents a good stepping-stone towards providing a quantifiable TCB for computing. Confidential computing [1] requires the use of a HW-attested Trusted Execution Environments for data-in-use protection. The RISC-V architecture presents a strong foundation for meeting the requirements for Confidential Computing and other security paradigms in a clean slate manner. This paper describes a reference architecture and discusses ISA, non-ISA and system-on-chip (SoC) requirements for confidential computing on RISC-V Platforms. It discusses proposed ISA and non-ISA Extension for Confidential Virtual Machine for RISC-V platforms, referred to as CoVE.

翻译：多租户计算平台通常由多种软件和硬件组件构成，包括平台固件、宿主操作系统内核、虚拟化监控器以及实际运行在这些组件上的租户负载（通常以虚拟机、容器或应用程序的形式存在）。虽然该模式在大规模商业部署中已得到充分验证，但其弊端在于所有平台组件及其操作者均属于租户的可信计算基（TCB）。这一特性对于旨在最小化TCB足迹的隐私导向型工作负载而言并不适用。机密计算为提供可量化的计算TCB提供了重要基础。机密计算[1]要求使用硬件可验证的可信执行环境来保护使用中的数据。RISC-V架构为满足机密计算及其他安全范式的要求提供了以全新架构方式实现的坚实基础。本文描述了面向RISC-V平台机密计算的参考架构，并探讨了其ISA、非ISA及片上系统（SoC）需求。文中还论述了面向RISC-V平台机密虚拟机（简称CoVE）的ISA与非ISA扩展提案。