RISC-V has emerged as a compelling alternative to proprietary instruction set architectures, distinguished by its openness, extensibility, and modularity. As the ecosystem matures, attention has turned to building confidential computing foundations, notably Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and secure enclaves, to support sensitive workloads. These efforts explore a variety of design directions, yet reveal important trade-offs. Some approaches achieve strong isolation guarantees, but fall short in scalability or broad adoption. Others introduce defenses, such as memory protection or side-channel resistance, although often with significant performance costs that limit deployment in constrained systems. Lightweight enclaves address embedded contexts, but lack the advanced security features demanded by complex applications. In addition, early-stage development, complex programming models, and limited real-world validation hinder their usability. This survey reviews the current landscape of RISC-V TEEs and secure enclaves, analyzing their architectural principles, strengths, and weaknesses. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to present such a consolidated view. Finally, we highlight open challenges and research opportunities, aiming toward establishing a cohesive and trustworthy RISC-V trusted computing ecosystem.

RISC-V has emerged as a compelling alternative to proprietary instruction set architectures, distinguished by its openness, extensibility, and modularity. As the ecosystem matures, attention has turned to building confidential computing foundations, notably Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and secure enclaves, to support sensitive workloads. These efforts explore a variety of design directions, yet reveal important trade-offs. Some approaches achieve strong isolation guarantees but fall short in scalability or broad adoption. Others introduce defenses such as memory protection or side-channel resistance, though often with significant performance costs that limit deployment in constrained systems. Lightweight enclaves address embedded contexts but lack the advanced security features demanded by complex applications. In addition, early stage development, complex programming models, and limited real-world validation hinder their usability. This survey reviews the current landscape of RISC-V TEEs and secure enclaves, analyzing architectural principles, strengths, and weaknesses. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to present such a consolidated view. Finally, we highlight open challenges and research opportunities toward establishing a cohesive and trustworthy RISC-V trusted computing ecosystem.

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) have become essential for securing sensitive computations across modern computing platforms. While the open RISC-V architecture offered promising opportunities for security innovation, the ecosystem had lacked a production-ready TEE framework suitable for real-world deployment. This study introduced GATOR-V, the first upstream-ready, production-grade TEE ecosystem for RISC-V. By combining hardware-enforced isolation and a standards-compliant trusted operating system architecture, GATOR-V provided a complete and reusable foundation that was successfully integrated into mainstream open-source projects. The framework was implemented and validated across multiple RISC-V platforms and demonstrated its practicality through representative use cases, including secure communication based on Transport Layer Security. Experimental evaluation confirmed that GATOR-V achieved strong security guarantees with minimal performance overhead. The full implementation was released as open source to ensure transparency, reproducibility, and community adoption. Overall, this work established a foundational step toward a unified and deployable confidential computing ecosystem for RISC-V, enabling future advancements in embedded systems, Internet of Things, and confidential computing applications.