Teechan: Payment Channels Using Trusted Execution Environments [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Teechan: Payment Channels Using Trusted Execution Environments [pdf]

cs.cornell.edu

42 pointsmrb14 comments

I call bullshit. This relies on special access to SGX which Intel controls. This means you must trust Intel and anyone who may hack Intel and therefore it is not a secure decentralized solution.

SGX requires contacting Intel's servers to get an attestation key. There is a good reason Intel requires this. That reason is that SGX doesn't otherwise provide the DRM it was designed to for. With out Intel's attestation keys anyone could emulate SGX in software thus exposing the code and data in the SGX enclave.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/01/sgx_secure_until_you...

If I'm not mistaken: 1) SGX is already shipped in Intel skylake CPU's (i5's and i7's). 2) Development access is publicly also available for anyone who wants to use SGX. Sure, to run an enclave in production mode and to perform remote attestation you need a license with Intel, however this is attainable.. 3) If you don't trust Intel: (i) don't use teechan? It doesn't affect the decentralization of Bitcoin. Bitcoin still has the same trust model, except now, anyone people who DO TRUST Intel can send bitcoins to each other through SGX as well. The rest of the network doesn't need to care; (ii) I guess you trust AMD - unless you've built your own processor from scratch? It seems odd to have a problem with trusting Intel. If you use Bitcoin at all you've probably already trusted Intel (e.g. their RNG to generate your private keys, their instructions to verify and sign you transactions etc.)

Overall, "I call bullshit" sounds like teechan isn't possible. It is.

I'm saying Teechan isn't secure in the way Bitcoin is. Your peers could be cheating and you wouldn't know it.

What do you mean? How do you know if your peers are cheating in the Bitcoin network? When they've broadcast a transaction that spends your money? At this point it's already too late.

In teechan the processor is responsible for holding your funds until you take them out of the channel. If somehow an attacker could steal them (which is very difficult to do considering the security model!), you would know that they cheated when they spent your funds on the network. I don't see the difference?

The teechan processor could steal your money because it's not secure.

I think you're wrong: SGX access is available through a license agreement. But more importantly, the contributions here aren't about using Intel SGX. Teechan is agnostic to the secure harware you want to use, as long as it provides the primitives required (e.g. attestation, integrity and coinfidentiality).

See this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/5jqxxc/scaling_bit...

The whole secure hardware idea is a fallacy.

So, step-one, find an trusted, open-source, TPM [crypto co-processor]?

I hope you wrote this comment using an AMD processor... ;)

ARM actually.

Unfortunately, SGX is not open for public use yet. You currently need special permission from Intel to access it.

Yeah, a license agreement? For the individual user it might not ideal right now, but for big Bitcoin players, that's easy to attain...

Wow, there's been some interesting discussion on reddit about this too.. looking forward to seeing the implementation https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/5jqxxc/scaling_bit...

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