Perhaps I'm just missing the point here, but what's a "permissioned blockchain" and how does it differ from a plain old database?
it'd decentralised, not controlled by single entity.
What's Intel SGX Good For?
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Re: What's Intel SGX Good For?
#12So the security of a blockchain now depends on the security of the SGX enclave? What could possibly go wrong... > Unfortunately, this proposal suffers from a critical security economics issue: node maintainers here have a strong incentive to break into their own SGX chips. If an adversary managed to compromise their SGX, they could win the leader election at every round by setting the timeout to 0. The more valuable…
It's not "your own platform", that's what the article gets wrong. The entire purpose of SGX is that it's my platform (that I can control/be assured that you can't), running on your hardware.
It's not my platform either, it's Intel's platform and I'm simply trusting them as to what code is running on SGX. Might as well trust Amazon or any other cloud provider.
Re: What's Intel SGX Good For?
#13Re: What's Intel SGX Good For?
#14So the security of a blockchain now depends on the security of the SGX enclave? What could possibly go wrong... > Unfortunately, this proposal suffers from a critical security economics issue: node maintainers here have a strong incentive to break into their own SGX chips. If an adversary managed to compromise their SGX, they could win the leader election at every round by setting the timeout to 0. The more valuable…
The assumption behind PoET is precisely that you don't control a part of your machine (the SGX enclave). I agree that that's an unreasonable assumption which is why we developed RRR.
Re: What's Intel SGX Good For?
#15Perhaps I'm just missing the point here, but what's a "permissioned blockchain" and how does it differ from a plain old database?
The main difference is spreading out the control of the database to multiple actors. No single entity is allowed to make unilateral changes to the state of the database.
Moreover, the line between permisisonless and permissioned blockchains isn't necessarily about who's allowed to join but rather which identity they use. For RRR, the only reason we limit ourselves to permissioned is because we require long lived identities to prevent sybil attacks; otherwise it's as "open" as any public blockchain.
Re: What's Intel SGX Good For?
#16Perhaps I'm just missing the point here, but what's a "permissioned blockchain" and how does it differ from a plain old database?
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Re: What's Intel SGX Good For?
#17This usage of SGX by Signal was pretty cool https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
Re: What's Intel SGX Good For?
#18On a related note, here's a project[1] that runs JS workers in Intel SGX enclaves using the Duktape JS interpreter.
Re: What's Intel SGX Good For?
#19So the security of a blockchain now depends on the security of the SGX enclave? What could possibly go wrong... > Unfortunately, this proposal suffers from a critical security economics issue: node maintainers here have a strong incentive to break into their own SGX chips. If an adversary managed to compromise their SGX, they could win the leader election at every round by setting the timeout to 0. The more valuable…
The assumption behind PoET is precisely that you don't control a part of your machine (the SGX enclave). I agree that that's an unreasonable assumption which is why we developed RRR.
> I agree that that's an unreasonable assumption which is why we developed RRR.
Out of curiosity, I would've hoped that the consensus in the cryptography community is that "secure enclaves" are pretty much snake oil to begin with... is this not the case?
(I mean... for a secure enclave to actually work, you need "perfect" physical security, "perfect" software implementation inside, and "perfect" design of the cryptographic systems around it... that sounds rather infeasible. I always assumed cryptographers would agree and that it's mostly engineers and lawyers trying to "ship the impossible" to do things like DRM.)
Re: What's Intel SGX Good For?
#20From a paper in that article: "Intel has recently added support for monotonic counters [5] as an optional SGX feature that an enclave developer may use for rollback attack pro- tection, when available. However, the security and per- formance properties of this mechanism are not precisely documented. We performed a detailed analysis of SGX counters and report our findings in Appendix B. To summarize, we found out that…
No problem, isn't it obvious?: instead of paying for electricity to mine blockchains, you now pay for new hardware! Protect the environment by filling Intel's pockets :D