PS-UIE: Privilege-Separated Integrity Enforcement for User-Space Executable Objects in Confidential VMs

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 3 Jun 2026] PS-UIE: Privilege-Separated Integrity Enforcement for User-Space Executable Objects in Confidential VMs Jingkai Mao, Xiaolin Chang Confidential Virtual Machines (CVMs), such as AMD SEV-SNP, enable cloud tenants to run security-sensitive workloads, but tenants can rely on the execution of these workloads only when they can trust the CVM. This trust requires continuous integrity assurance from CVM launch to the current runtime state, including initial trust establishment at launch and subsequent runtime integrity assurance. Existing works help establish launch-time trust and protect parts of runtime integrity, but they do not fully address the integrity of file-backed user-space executable objects, such as main executables, program interpreters, and dynamically loaded shared objects, that may be loaded or mapped dynamically during execution inside CVMs. In this paper, we propose Privilege-Separated User-space Integrity Enforcement (PS-UIE), an approach for enforcing the integrity of user-space executable objects inside AMD SEV-SNP-based CVMs. PS-UIE consists of a privilege-separated architecture and three mechanisms. The architecture separates the authority for integrity measurement and enforcement from the measured targets by placing it in a higher-privileged protected domain. Built on this architecture, PS-UIE provides policy lifecycle management, execution-time integrity enforcement, and evidence export and verification mechanisms. It enables policy-controlled integrity measurement and enforcement for user-space executable objects and generates verifiable runtime evidence. We implement PS-UIE on an AMD SEV-SNP platform. The security analysis and performance evaluation show that PS-UIE enforces the integrity of user-space executable objects on the covered execute-permission grant paths and provides verifiable runtime evidence while incurring acceptable overhead. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2606.04549 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.04549v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.04549 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Xiaolin Chang [view email] [v1] Wed, 3 Jun 2026 07:33:50 UTC (969 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)