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.

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On Borrowed Time – Preventing Static Side-Channel Analysis

Robert Dumitru (Ruhr University Bochum and The University of Adelaide), Thorben Moos (UCLouvain), Andrew Wabnitz (Defence Science and Technology Group), Yuval Yarom (Ruhr University Bochum)

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BULKHEAD: Secure, Scalable, and Efficient Kernel Compartmentalization with PKS

Yinggang Guo (State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University; University of Minnesota), Zicheng Wang (State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University), Weiheng Bai (University of Minnesota), Qingkai Zeng (State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University), Kangjie Lu (University of Minnesota)

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Dissecting Payload-based Transaction Phishing on Ethereum

Zhuo Chen (Zhejiang University), Yufeng Hu (Zhejiang University), Bowen He (Zhejiang University), Dong Luo (Zhejiang University), Lei Wu (Zhejiang University), Yajin Zhou (Zhejiang University)

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How Different Tokenization Algorithms Impact LLMs and Transformer Models...

Ahmed Mostafa, Raisul Arefin Nahid, Samuel Mulder (Auburn University)

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