ACE: Towards A High-Assurance Isolated Virtualization Environment for RISC-V

Wojciech Ozga; Guerney D. H. Hunt; Michael V. Le; Lennard Gäher; Avraham Shinnar; Elaine R. Palmer; Hani Jamjoom; Silvio Dragone

arXiv · 2505.12995

ACE: Towards A High-Assurance Isolated Virtualization Environment for RISC-V

Wojciech Ozga·Guerney D. H. Hunt·Michael V. Le·Lennard Gäher·Avraham Shinnar·Elaine R. Palmer·Hani Jamjoom·Silvio Dragone

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Abstract

Confidential computing has proven its value in cloud environments, but its potential for securing edge and high-end embedded systems (e.g., automotive controllers, cryptographic accelerators, telco infrastructure) remains largely unexplored. We present ACE, an open-source, royalty-free virtualization-based confidential computing system for RISC-V targeting these environments. ACE isolates software into confidential virtual machines with narrow, well-defined interfaces, building exclusively on commodity RISC-V hardware without specialized hardware extensions or licensing fees. Our prototype evaluation on the first commercially available RISC-V hardware supporting virtualization shows that ACE is a viable candidate for our target systems.

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Wojciech Ozga, Guerney D. H. Hunt, Michael V. Le, Lennard Gäher, Avraham Shinnar, Elaine R. Palmer, Hani Jamjoom, Silvio Dragone. 2025-05-19. ACE: Towards A High-Assurance Isolated Virtualization Environment for RISC-V. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12995

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