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EncELC: Hardening and Enriching Ethereum Light Clients with Trusted Enclaves

  • Chengjun Cai
  • , Lei Xu
  • , Anxin Zhou
  • , Ruochen Wang
  • , Cong Wang
  • , Qian Wang
  • City University of Hong Kong
  • Wuhan University

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

The rapid growth of Ethereum blockchain has brought extremely heavy overhead for coin owners or developers to bootstrap and access transactions on Ethereum. To address this, light client is enabled, which only stores a small fraction of blockchain data and relies on bootstrapped full nodes for transaction retrievals. However, because the retrieval requests are outsourced, it raises several severe concerns about the integrity of returned results and the leakage of sensitive blockchain access histories, largely hindering the wider adoption of this important lightweight design. In addition to security issues, the continuously increasing blockchain storage also urges for more effective query functionalities for the Ethereum blockchain, so as to enable more flexible and precise transaction retrievals.In this paper, we propose EncELC, a new Ethereum light client design that enforces full-fledged protections for clients and enables rich queries over the Ethereum blockchain. EncELC leverages trusted hardware (e.g., Intel SGX) as a starting point for building efficient yet secure processing, and further crafts several crucial performance and security refinement designs to boost query efficiency and conceal leakages inside and outside SGX enclave. We implement a prototype of EncELC and test its performance in several real settings, and the results have confirmed the practicality of EncELC.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationINFOCOM 2020 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages1887-1896
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781728164120
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2020
Externally publishedYes
Event38th IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, INFOCOM 2020 - Toronto, Canada
Duration: 6 Jul 20209 Jul 2020

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE INFOCOM
Volume2020-July
ISSN (Print)0743-166X

Conference

Conference38th IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, INFOCOM 2020
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityToronto
Period6/07/209/07/20

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