Paper 2020/1486

CommiTEE: An Efficient and Secure Commit-Chain Protocol using TEEs

Andreas Erwig, Sebastian Faust, Siavash Riahi, and Tobias Stöckert

Abstract

Permissionless blockchain systems such as Bitcoin or Ethereum are slow and expensive, since transactions are processed in a distributed network by a large set of parties. To improve on these shortcomings, a prominent approach is given by so-called 2nd-layer protocols. In these protocols parties process transactions off-chain directly between each other, thereby drastically reducing the costly and slow interaction with the blockchain. In particular, in the optimistic case, when parties behave honestly, no interaction with the blockchain is needed. One of the most popular off-chain solutions are Plasma protocols (often also called commit-chains). These protocols are orchestrated by a so-called operator that maintains the system and processes transactions between parties. Importantly, the operator is trustless, i.e., even if it is malicious users of the system are guaranteed to not lose funds. To achieve this guarantee, Plasma protocols are highly complex and require involved and expensive dispute resolution processes. This has significantly slowed down development and deployment of these systems. In this work we propose CommiTEE-- a simple and efficient Plasma system leveraging the power of trusted execution environments (TEE). Besides its simplicity, our protocol requires minimal interaction with the blockchain, thereby drastically reducing costs and improving efficiency. An additional benefit of our solution is that it allows for switching between operators, in case the main operator goes offline due to system failure, or behaving maliciously. We implemented and evaluated our system over Ethereum and show that it is at least $2$ times (and in some cases more than $16$ times) cheaper in terms of communication complexity when compared to existing Plasma implementations. Moreover, for protocols using zero-knowledge proofs (like NOCUST-ZKP), CommiTEE decreases the on-chain gas cost by a factor $\approx 19$ compared to prior solution.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
BlockchainOff-ChainTEECommit-ChainPlasma
Contact author(s)
andreas erwig @ tu-darmstadt de
Siavash riahi @ tu-darmstadt de
History
2020-11-30: revised
2020-11-29: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2020/1486
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2020/1486,
      author = {Andreas Erwig and Sebastian Faust and Siavash Riahi and Tobias Stöckert},
      title = {CommiTEE: An Efficient and Secure Commit-Chain Protocol using TEEs},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2020/1486},
      year = {2020},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1486}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1486}
}
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