Abstract:
In the growing untrusted factor of users on third parties for their services, the
demand for secure decentralised services has been increasing dramatically from last few
years and some technologies like blockchain promoted to use such decentralised services
by providing the concept of smart contracts. But in reality, these smart contracts are
not actually smart, as data inputs from internet or client could be manipulated and
smart contracts themselves do not have the ability to authenticate the integrity and
confidentiality of that data.
This research work focuses on validating a peer to peer decentralised secure data
inputs in a network of smart contracts. In this research shielded execution technology
specifically SGX provided by Intel, is leveraged to secure data confidentiality and integrity in a distributed networked system, which enables security of data from third
parties even when the system is compromised. This provide users more freedom to trust
on data feeds from local network or cloud systems without exposing data to others. This
research work represents the first study for securing data inputs to smart contracts using
OpenSGX based trusted area in which data is processed in Enclave and validated. It is
ensured that smart contracts rules are in public blockchain ledger and data is shared to
those who satisfy smart contracts conditions. In this way, smart contracts security flaw
could be removed using extra layer of SGX security and in return it also mitigates some
of the possibilities of attacks on SGX due to the decentralised nature of smart contracts.
In this research to utilise Intel-SGX, an emulated software library provided by
Open SGX is used to virtualize SGX hardware in a virtual machine. Due to Open SGX,
development process is achieved fast and with minimum coding requirements in decentralised applications. Use of OpenSGX causes some overheads which could be borne
due to provided enhanced security output.
