OPENCCA: An Open Framework to Enable Arm CCA Research

Confidential computing has gained traction across major architectures with Intel TDX, AMD SEV-SNP, and Arm CCA. Unlike TDX and SEV-SNP, a key challenge in researching Arm CCA is the absence of hardware support, forcing researchers to develop ad-hoc prototypes on CCA emulators and non-CCA Arm boards. This approach leads to high barriers to entry or duplicated efforts leading to unsound and inconsistent comparisons. To address this, we present OPENCCA, an open research platform that enables the execution of CCA-bound code on commodity Armv8.2 hardware. By systematically adapting the software stack (including bootloader, firmware, hypervisor, and kernel), OPENCCA emulates CCA operations for performance evaluation while preserving functional correctness. We demonstrate its effectiveness with typical life-cycle measurements and case-studies inspired by prior CCA-based papers on an easily available Arm v8.2 Rockchip board that costs $ 250.