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The Forking Way: When TEEs Meet Consensus

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arxiv 2412.00706 v1 pith:QNNKDDXF submitted 2024-12-01 cs.CR

classification cs.CR
keywords teesblockchainsconsensusforkingattacksanalysisanalyzeblockchain
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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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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Cited by 1 Pith paper

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Securing Private Federated Learning in a Malicious Setting: A Scalable TEE-Based Approach with Client Auditing

    cs.LG 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    The paper shows that an ephemeral TEE planner with randomized client auditing can realize DP-FTRL under a malicious server with small constant client overhead.

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