Annika Wilde (Ruhr University Bochum), Tim Niklas Gruel (Ruhr University Bochum), Claudio Soriente (NEC Laboratories Europe), Ghassan Karame (Ruhr University Bochum)

An increasing number of distributed platforms combine Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) with blockchains. Indeed, many hail the combination of TEEs and blockchains a good “marriage”: TEEs bring confidential computing to the blockchain while the consensus layer could help defend TEEs from forking attacks.

In this paper, we systemize how current blockchain solutions integrate TEEs and to what extent they are secure against forking attacks. To do so, we thoroughly analyze 29 proposals for TEE-based blockchains, ranging from academic proposals to production-ready platforms. We uncover a lack of consensus in the community on how to combine TEEs and blockchains. In particular, we identify four broad means to interconnect TEEs with consensus, analyze their limitations, and discuss possible remedies. Our analysis also reveals previously undocumented forking attacks on three production-ready TEE-based blockchains: Ten, Phala, and the Secret Network. We leverage our analysis to propose effective countermeasures against those vulnerabilities; we responsibly disclosed our findings to the developers of each affected platform.

View More Papers

CLIBE: Detecting Dynamic Backdoors in Transformer-based NLP Models

Rui Zeng (Zhejiang University), Xi Chen (Zhejiang University), Yuwen Pu (Zhejiang University), Xuhong Zhang (Zhejiang University), Tianyu Du (Zhejiang University), Shouling Ji (Zhejiang University)

Read More

Rondo: Scalable and Reconfiguration-Friendly Randomness Beacon

Xuanji Meng (Tsinghua University), Xiao Sui (Shandong University), Zhaoxin Yang (Tsinghua University), Kang Rong (Blockchain Platform Division,Ant Group), Wenbo Xu (Blockchain Platform Division,Ant Group), Shenglong Chen (Blockchain Platform Division,Ant Group), Ying Yan (Blockchain Platform Division,Ant Group), Sisi Duan (Tsinghua University)

Read More

The Kids Are All Right: Investigating the Susceptibility of...

Elijah Bouma-Sims (Carnegie Mellon University), Lily Klucinec (Carnegie Mellon University), Mandy Lanyon (Carnegie Mellon University), Julie Downs (Carnegie Mellon University), Lorrie Faith Cranor (Carnegie Mellon University)

Read More

Wallbleed: A Memory Disclosure Vulnerability in the Great Firewall...

Shencha Fan (GFW Report), Jackson Sippe (University of Colorado Boulder), Sakamoto San (Shinonome Lab), Jade Sheffey (UMass Amherst), David Fifield (None), Amir Houmansadr (UMass Amherst), Elson Wedwards (None), Eric Wustrow (University of Colorado Boulder)

Read More