The future of secure blockchain applications
The post The future of secure blockchain applications appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
Amid growing interest in practical ways to scale and safeguard blockchains, hardware‑based approaches are coming into focus. The role of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) in blockchain systems has gradually expanded from privacy-preserving projects to applications that improve scalability and enable secure offchain computation. Currently, over 50 teams are working on TEE-based blockchain projects. In this article, Cointelegraph Research explores the technical foundations of TEEs in blockchain systems and examines key use cases of this technology. Mechanics of TEEs in blockchains Most blockchain technology relies on cryptography and distributed computing to maintain security. TEEs add a different approach, namely, hardware-level trust. A Trusted Execution Environment is an isolated area within a device processor that is designed to keep data and code tamper-proof and confidential during execution. The resulting secure enclave is inaccessible to the rest of the operating system and can prove to third parties through remote attestation what instructions it is executing. To do this, the CPU measures the Trusted Computing Base, which includes the boot firmware, operating system kernel and application binaries and saves it into secure hardware registers. It then signs this measurement using a private attestation key embedded in the CPU. This produces a cryptographic attestation report that a remote verifier can check to confirm the enclave’s authenticity and integrity. Leveraging this hardware-level trust for confidential smart contract execution requires that blockchain nodes use chips with a TEE. This requirement typically applies to nodes that are responsible for transaction as well as block validation and offchain computation. In a layer-1 setup, consensus nodes continue to replicate an encrypted version of each contract’s state as part of the global ledger. Each of the nodes contains a TEE that replicates the decryption, plaintext execution and reencryption of every transaction. This hardware dependence introduces a trade-off between enhanced privacy and…
