Live migration of applications is a fundamental capability for enabling resilient computing in modern distributed systems. However, extending this functionality to trusted applications (TA) -- executing within Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) -- introduces unique challenges such as secure state preservation, integrity verification, replay and rollback prevention, and mitigation of unauthorized cloning of TAs. We present TALOS, a lightweight framework for verifiable state management and trustworthy application migration. While our implementation is prototyped and evaluated using Intel SGX with the Gramine LibOS and RISC-V Keystone (evidencing the framework's portability across diverse TEEs), its design is agnostic to the underlying TEE architecture. Such agility is a necessity in today's network service mesh (collaborative computing across the continuum) where application workloads must be managed across domain boundaries in a harmonized fashion. TALOS is built around the principle of minimizing trust assumptions: TAs are treated as untrusted until explicitly verified, and the migration process does not rely on a trusted third party. To ensure both the integrity and secure launch of the migrated application, TALOS integrates memory introspection and control-flow graph extraction, enabling robust verification of state continuity and execution flow. Thereby achieving strong security guarantees while maintaining efficiency, making it suitable for decentralized settings.
Vasileaidis et al. (Fri,) studied this question.
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