A trusted execution environment (TEE) is a secure area of a CPU. It guarantees code and data loaded inside to be protected concerning confidentiality and integrity. Although it is popular in academia and industry and has already been used by most people (in an unconscious manner), the details of TEE is are still unclear to most users. In this talk, we try to give a brief introduction to this promising technology and show how Phala utilizes it to secure the privacy of our users.

Dr. Shelven Zhou, lead researcher of Phala Network.

Ph.D. Candidate in System Software and Security Laboratory, Fudan University, lead author of An Ever-evolving Game: Evaluation of Real-world Attacks and Defenses in Ethereum Ecosystem, USENIX Security 20. Co-author of other papers in top-tier security conferences.

Phala Network tackles the issue of trust in the computation cloud.

This blockchain is a trustless computation platform that enables massive cloud processing without sacrificing data confidentiality. Built around TEE-based privacy technology already embedded into modern processors, Phala Network’s distributed computing cloud is versatile and confidential. By separating the consensus mechanism from computation, Phala ensures processing power is highly scalable but not wasteful. Together, this creates the infrastructure for a powerful, secure, and scalable trustless computing cloud.

Tech Talk 01 | Trusted Execution Environment 101