Session 4D: Blockchain Security 1
Authors, Creators & Presenters: Annika Wilde (Ruhr University Bochum), Tim Niklas Gruel (Ruhr University Bochum), Claudio Soriente (NEC Laboratories Europe), Ghassan Karame (Ruhr University Bochum)
PAPER
The Forking Way: When TEEs Meet Consensus
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.
ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.
Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations’ YouTube Channel.
Permalink
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Infosecurity.US authored by Marc Handelman. Read the original post at: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/5wdntWrHUws?si=_AVHD2TrIY_cTN7H
