Serverless Confidential Containers: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Serverless computing allows users to execute pieces of code (so called functions) on-demand in the cloud without having to provision any hardware resources. However, by executing in the cloud and delegating control over hardware resources, the integrity of the execution and the confidentiality of function code and data are at the mercy of the cloud provider and serverless runtime. Confidential computing aims to remove trust from the cloud provider by executing applications inside hardware enclaves. In spite of the increasing adoption of confidential computing, designing a confidential serverless runtime with moderate performance overhead remains an open challenge.