Tyche: Composable Isolation as a Foundation to Manage Trust in the Cloud

TL;DR

Tyche introduces a novel, composable security abstraction for cloud workloads, enabling flexible, attestable isolation boundaries that enhance trust management without hardware modifications.

Contribution

It proposes Tyche, a security monitor that creates nested, attestable security domains using explicit capabilities, unifying various isolation mechanisms into a single, portable abstraction.

Findings

Tyche achieves end-to-end security guarantees for distrustful components.

It runs on commodity hardware with minimal overhead, 2% slowdown in confidential LLM inference.

Tyche subsumes enclaves, sandboxes, and CVMs as a first-class cloud primitive.

Abstract

Cloud workloads combine software components from different parties to process sensitive data. Each component has its own trust model - it must protect its assets from the rest of the system, yet share sensitive data with components it cannot trust to keep confidential. This tension requires composing isolation boundaries for confidentiality and encapsulation. Unfortunately, the cloud offers no direct way to compose such boundaries, forcing tenants to assemble, deploy, and maintain their own solutions. This paper shifts that burden back to the infrastructure by making composable, attestable isolation a first-class systems abstraction. We present Tyche, a security monitor that centers isolation around a unified composable abstraction: security domains (SDs). An SD is an execution environment whose access to machine resources - memory, cores, devices - is controlled through explicit capabilities. A small set of capability operations enables SDs to partition, share, and reclaim resources; by nesting recursively, SDs compose attestable trust boundaries for confidentiality and encapsulation. Tyche attests these compositions, providing end-to-end security guarantees for workloads made of mutually distrustful components. As a first-class cloud primitive, this single abstraction subsumes enclaves, sandboxes, CVMs, and their compositions. Tyche provides composable isolation without sacrificing compatibility with existing hardware and software stacks. It runs on commodity x86 64 hardware without security extensions, and a RISC-V prototype demonstrates portability across platforms. Our SDK composes isolation for unmodified workloads within SDs with minimal overhead. In a confidential LLM inference scenario with mutually distrustful users, model owners, and cloud providers, the slowdown is just 2% compared to bare-metal Linux.