Abstract:
The memory encryption mechanism in confidential computing environments renders the internal state of confidential virtual machines (CVMs) invisible to the host. While ensuring internal data security, this poses severe technical challenges for traditional hypervisor-based disaster recovery and backup solutions. Meanwhile, existing solutions relying on TEE secure processors suffer from severe performance bottlenecks, which heavily restricts the deployment of cloud confidential computing clusters and degrades their security resilience. This paper presents ResiCVM (Resilient Confidential Virtual Machine), a resilient disaster recovery and backup framework based on intra-VM privilege isolation. ResiCVM shifts the state extraction and cryptographic protection logic from the legacy TEE secure processor to a high-privilege domain within the VM, strictly excluding the guest operating system from the Trusted Computing Base (TCB). Additionally, we design an end-to-end cryptographic authentication protocol to ensure secure communication between the VM and the security management center during the state backup process. We implemented a prototype of ResiCVM on the AMD EPYC 9745 platform. Experimental evaluations show that ResiCVM achieves a backup encapsulation and storage throughput 62.7 times higher than that of TEE secure processor-based schemes. Crucially, during concurrent multi-VM maintenance tasks, ResiCVM maintains stable execution efficiency, whereas TEE-based solutions suffer proportional performance degradation. Requiring zero host-side modifications, ResiCVM significantly improves disaster recovery performance and provides robust technical support for the secure operations and security resilience of confidential computing clusters.