Characterizing Trust Boundary Vulnerabilities in TEE Container Systems: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) have become a cornerstone of confidential computing, attracting significant attention from academia and industry. To support secure and scalable application deployment on confidential clouds, TEE containers (Tcons) have been introduced as middleware to shield applications from malicious operating systems and orchestration layers while preserving usability. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive analysis of Tcons, focusing on three critical layers: OS interfaces, encrypted I/O, and orchestration mechanisms. To enable systematic evaluation, we design TBouncer, an automated analyzer that precisely exercises and benchmarks Tcon isolation boundaries. Our study uncovers fundamental flaws in existing Tcons, leading to exploitable vulnerabilities such as code execution, denial-of-service, and information leakage. In total, we identify six attack vectors, twelve new bugs, and three CVEs. These findings provide new insights into the underestimated attack surface of Tcons and highlight key directions for building more secure and trustworthy container solutions.