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

WIP: Towards Privacy Compliance by Design in the Matter...

Yichen Liu (Indiana University Bloomington), Jingwen Yan (Clemson University), Song Liao (Texas Tech University), Long Cheng (Clemson University), Luyi Xing (Indiana University Bloomington)

Read More

Speak Up, I’m Listening: Extracting Speech from Zero-Permission VR...

Derin Cayir (Florida International University), Reham Mohamed Aburas (American University of Sharjah), Riccardo Lazzeretti (Sapienza University of Rome), Marco Angelini (Link Campus University of Rome), Abbas Acar (Florida International University), Mauro Conti (University of Padua), Z. Berkay Celik (Purdue University), Selcuk Uluagac (Florida International University)

Read More

Uncovering the iceberg from the tip: Generating API Specifications...

Miaoqian Lin (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China), Kai Chen (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China), Yi Yang (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of…

Read More

ReDAN: An Empirical Study on Remote DoS Attacks against...

Xuewei Feng (Tsinghua University), Yuxiang Yang (Tsinghua University), Qi Li (Tsinghua University), Xingxiang Zhan (Zhongguancun Lab), Kun Sun (George Mason University), Ziqiang Wang (Southeast University), Ao Wang (Southeast University), Ganqiu Du (China Software Testing Center), Ke Xu (Tsinghua University)

Read More