Intel, the largest chip-maker in the world, is looking to trusted execution environments on its hardware chips to enhance security and privacy for blockchain users.
Speaking at the Tomorrow’s Transactions conference in London this week, Kelly Olson, director of the distributed ledger technology group at Intel , discussed ways it is possible to use a "secure enclave", similar to what Apple uses for its Touch ID , to increase blockchain security.
Olson’s group is conducting research on large-scale deployments of blockchains that could scale to several tens of thousands or millions of nodes, though he said the work is still in early stages.
Still, Olson made the case for using secure hardware solutions that can provide a trusted computation environment. The immediate use case of such a hardware solution would be for key management in blockchains.
Discussing bitcoin specifically, Olson noted that even though the public blockchain network itself has been very secure, users have experienced losses due to lost or stolen private keys.
Olson said: "While initial blockchain deployments like bitcoin have proven to be quite secure, they have shifted the burden of security from the network to the endpoints that write to the blockchain." Olson discussed the use of such a secured hardware computing environment not just in security, but also privacy.
The goal is to bring privacy to the blockchain without centralization, he said, which could prove a difficult task. One proposed solution is to treat the hardware itself as a trusted third-party that can provide a level of verification that is generally either publicly distributed or privately validated.
“Privacy is one of the most difficult problems to solve, as transaction validation and transparency often go hand in hand," he said. Intel experiments Olson also offered new insights into the blockchain experiments ongoing in Intel’s labs.For example, he said that his team has […]
