OpenCCA: An Open Framework to Enable Arm CCA Research

TL;DR

OpenCCA is an open platform that enables Arm CCA research by emulating CCA operations on commodity hardware, reducing barriers and enabling consistent performance evaluation.

Contribution

It introduces OpenCCA, a novel open framework that allows CCA-bound code execution on standard Arm hardware, addressing hardware support limitations.

Findings

Enables performance evaluation of CCA on commodity Arm hardware

Demonstrates functional correctness through case studies

Reduces barriers to Arm CCA research

Abstract

Confidential computing has gained traction across major architectures with Intel TDX, AMD SEV-SNP, and Arm CCA. Unlike TDX and SEV-SNP, a key challenge in researching Arm CCA is the absence of hardware support, forcing researchers to develop ad-hoc performance prototypes on non-CCA Arm boards. This approach leads to duplicated efforts, inconsistent performance comparisons, and high barriers to entry. To address this, we present OpenCCA, an open research platform that enables the execution of CCA-bound code on commodity Armv8.2 hardware. By systematically adapting the software stack -- including bootloader, firmware, hypervisor, and kernel -- OpenCCA emulates CCA operations for performance evaluation while preserving functional correctness. We demonstrate its effectiveness with typical life-cycle measurements and case-studies inspired by prior CCA-based papers on a easily available Armv8.2 Rockchip board that costs $250.