SEVeriFast: Minimizing the root of trust for fast startup of SEV microVMs

Serverless computing platforms rely on fast container initialization to provide low latency and high throughput for requests. While hardware enforced trusted execution environments (TEEs) have gained popularity, confidential computing has yet to be widely adopted by latency-sensitive platforms due to its additional initialization overhead. We investigate the application of AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) to microVMs and find that current startup times for confidential VMs are prohibitively slow due to the high cost of establishing a root of trust for each new VM.