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.

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Dongwei Xiao (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Zhibo Liu (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Yiteng Peng (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Shuai Wang (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

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ProvGuard: Detecting SDN Control Policy Manipulation via Contextual Semantics...

Ziwen Liu (Beihang University), Jian Mao (Beihang University; Tianmushan Laboratory; Hangzhou Innovation Institute, Beihang University), Jun Zeng (National University of Singapore), Jiawei Li (Beihang University; National University of Singapore), Qixiao Lin (Beihang University), Jiahao Liu (National University of Singapore), Jianwei Zhuge (Tsinghua University; Zhongguancun Laboratory), Zhenkai Liang (National University of Singapore)

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Sena Sahin (Georgia Institute of Technology), Burak Sahin (Georgia Institute of Technology), Frank Li (Georgia Institute of Technology)

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KernelSnitch: Side Channel-Attacks on Kernel Data Structures

Lukas Maar (Graz University of Technology), Jonas Juffinger (Graz University of Technology), Thomas Steinbauer (Graz University of Technology), Daniel Gruss (Graz University of Technology), Stefan Mangard (Graz University of Technology)

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