TEE Prover
SGX-based execution proving for multi-prover L2 and rollup systems.
There are many reasons why a multi-prover system — and specifically the use of trusted execution environments such as Intel SGX as a secondary prover — is desirable:
- Multi-prover rollups encourage greater resilience and decentralization.
- Distributing trust across different proof constructions mitigates systemic vulnerabilities.
- The TEE Prover scales security across Layer 2s with negligible overhead and hardware-grade isolation.
Design of TEE Prover
There are two main components to the TEE Prover architecture:
- SGX Prover: An offchain component that checks that the post-state root matches the existing state root after block execution within the secure enclave, and submits the Proof of Execution (PoE) to the SGX Verifier.
- SGX Verifier: An L1 contract that confirms the correctness of the state transition proposed by the SGX Prover. It also verifies the attestation report submitted by the Intel SGX enclave to ensure prover integrity.
Onchain verification of Intel SGX
Remote attestation allows the properties and integrity of the Intel SGX enclave to be programmatically verified. This is a critical process for establishing that any computations or data processing it performs are trustworthy.
Using a smart contract as the remote verifying party creates a public and transparent onchain anchor that enables trust composability: other smart contracts can also rely on computations carried out within the secure enclave.
Automata DCAP Attestation is a Solidity implementation that allows attestation reports from enclaves to be fully verified onchain.
The attestation report contains the cryptographic measurement of the execution environment — hardware, software, and custom data — which is fundamental for:
- Integrity: The SGX Prover operates the anticipated software version within a verifiable TEE that is impervious to forgery or alteration, even by the infrastructure operator.
- Authenticity: The SGX Prover possesses a keypair securely confined within the TEE. The public key from this pair is embedded in the attestation report, allowing external verification of the message's source.
Open-source implementation
The SGX Prover and SGX Verifier live in a mono-repository licensed under Apache 2.0:
automata-network/sgx-prover