## 7 Conclusions  
The academic community has proposed several approaches to ensure the security of virtual TPMs. One of the most common strategies is hardware-based anchoring, in which the vTPM is bound to a physical TPM. However, approaches that adopt this strategy require the presence of a TPM chip on all nodes. Moreover, these solutions do not take into account the possibility of redundant anchoring across multiple TPM chips.  
Moreover, scenarios in which VMs using vTPM instances run on a hyperconverged architecture have become increasingly common. In this context, it is crucial to present proposals that incorporate and leverage the principles of this model, integrating effectively with the existing solutions.  
In this work, we address the problem of secure anchoring of virtual TPMs in hyperconverged environments. In this context, we propose a hyperconverged TPM. In this approach,the individual TPMs associated with physical hosts form a pool of TPMs that are shared among all the m-vTPMs through a management system. We consider a vTPM anchoring approach based on evidence of both persistent and volatile state integrity, with the root of trust being the hyperconverged TPM. In this scenario, an m-vTPM hosted on a given physical host can use the TPM associated with a different physical host. This approach is suitable for hybrid scenarios in which not all the hosts are equipped with a TPM chip, and it also enables the distribution of anchoring replicas--particularly useful for critical services that require high availability and reliability guarantees.  
The evaluation results indicate that the proposed solution is feasible, presenting a moderate and acceptable overhead without significantly impacting system performance. The analysis demonstrates increased anchoring time, ranging from 7.62 ms to 8.48 ms for remote anchoring without mTLS, and from 24.22 ms to 25.00 ms with mTLS. Additionally, average increases in memory usage of 2.97 percentage points without mTLS and 3.82 percentage points with mTLS were observed, while CPU usage showed a slight increase of 0.18 percentage points without mTLS and 0.56 percentage points with mTLS. These results demonstrate that the proposed approach maintains system performance within acceptable parameters, with the additional costs being justified by the benefits of its implementation.  
The experimental scenarios considered demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed solution. As directions for future work, we propose expanding the scope of experimentation to include more representative environments, employing enterprise-grade equipment, as well as investigating other vTPM emulators and hyperconverged solutions. In parallel, we intend to assess the effectiveness of the approach in mitigating potential vulnerabilities, including those already documented by the scientific community. Furthermore, exploring the integration of the solution with confidentiality-based anchoring schemes previously proposed in the literature is considered a promising direction.  
Writing--original draft, M.S.; Writing--review & editing, R.G. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This research was funded by National Council for Scientific and Technological Development grant number 160260/2021-3.  
The data presented in this study are openly available in [[https://github.com/marcelagaldino/results/](https://github.com/marcelagaldino/results/)]([https://github.com/marcelagaldino/results/](https://github.com/marcelagaldino/results/)) (accessed on 12 May 2025).  
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.