It's Time for TEEs - Gavin Thomas

thank you marvelous um so this is quite interesting CU if you were listening to the um to the chap who's just talking he literally just took a massive dump on tees so uh I'm going to argue a slightly different different case for tees and um just a quick intro about myself so I'm Gavin uh I've been uh embedded in web 3 since about 2015 um I had the pleasure of of building an Enterprise grade blockchain in that time and I uh co-founded a startup and I inaugurated a dow so I've done a few things uh and you might notice I'm English and in England tea is quite a big deal in England in actual fact there was a come on in come on in take a seat don't be shy and um there was actually a survey done in England a number of years ago and the English uh population were asked to pick one thing that represented England and the one thing they chose was a cup of tea a cup of tea represents an entire country however I'm not going to talk to you about tea I'm going to talk to you about teaes today slightly different kind of tea um before we do that I'm going to suggest there's a problem with ethereum right now and that problem is that all data on ethereum by Design is completely transparent all data is visible um so things like me meev is a thing because data is transparent and now there some Regulators around the world that want to put a stop to me they might even start calling me illegal for example so that's a problem um you can uh find out sensitive information about people if it ended up ever ended up on the blockchain and essentially that transparency is really limit in what we can be doing on ethereum a quick primer on te then um it's Hardware based if you imagine the CPU and the memory on a server there's a ring fenced part of that CPU or memory and that ring fenced area is entirely encrypted so you any computations that you run within that ring fenced area nobody can access the operating system can't access it a compromised operating system cannot access it even the human being operating that server cannot access the computation happening within that te which is pretty cool because immediately if you want to run software and within that software you want you want to have some confidentiality you want to have some Secrets then you can run that within uh a te and nobody else can see it they can only see the output from that computation uh the they're pretty common so uh te's probably been around a bit longer than you might realize uh they're all in every phone in your pocket has a te all laptops have a te a couple of years ago there was um a bit of news about Intel uh deprecating their te Intel sgx being deprecated on laptops the reason they did that is because they were using te for digital Rights Management and everybody stopped watching Blu-rays on their laptop tops so they decided to deprecate that however Intel are still doubling down on tees for their server class Zeon processors so they're pretty common they are they are literally everywhere they might even be in your fridge and there's a really neat feature with tees if you think back to what I was saying about you're running this software in a in a confidential encrypted space then you might think well hang on how do I know that that software that's in that encrypted space if I can't see into it how do I know it's running the thing I know want it to run how do I know it's not adding a zero onto the onto the loan that I owe to to Bob over there and so there's this concept called attestation and attestation is the feature of tees that lets you validate that the software you think is running inside the te is in fact running inside the te and you can go through a a measurement process to prove that so you you gain confidence that it's doing what it should do so before before I get on to web 3 let's think about we've got these tees we've got um encrypted spaces Within These tees we've got these tees within servers we've got a whole ton of servers living in the cloud uh take your pick as your IBM Alibaba they're all running VMS that are capable of running a te so if you start connecting these together and you run the software Within These enclaves then you get an encrypted Network out the box I mean that's great isn't it you suddenly encrypted your entire network you're not just relying on TLS for your inputs and outputs you've even got all the stuff that's happening on that server on that entire network is entirely encrypted and even more than that because tees are capable of running um a more complex software environment you could run an entire ethereum virtual machine within a te so you're running the entire evm within an encrypted space and so you think well if I can run evm I can run a smart contract so you suddenly have what we call programmable privacy so the developer building the smart contract can decide what data they want to be private and what data they want to be public and that's that's quite unique and I'll come back to that in a minute but there are myths around tees you've probably heard about tees already you know uh you got to be a a rock scientists to use them um they're really difficult to get a hold of um they slow everything down they get hacked all the time and anyway we got zkp and fhe coming along why do we have to care about tees anymore well as a support of tees I'm going to try and argue against some of those so in terms of developer experties if you deploy a VM into a z properly today that VM uh a VM with tees that VM will behave just like a nonte server nothing new straightforward in terms of performance um we've run we've run performance tests and we think there's about an 8% decrease in performance for computation 8% not much when you're talking about micros seconds really isn't much in terms of hacks okay so there have been hacked but all the hacks I'm aware of have been very much in lab conditions and when I say lab conditions that's somebody with physical access to the chip they're doing some microscopic analysis on that chip and they're able to infer some information and if and if there's other hacks that are more deep than that like there was one recently that I think um the previous panel were referring to they're on deprecated Hardware or they're unpatched unpatched Hardware so tees are more secure than you might be led to believe and zkp yeah so zkp is going to going to save all save everything right because zkp is awesome and it is awesome to a point however I mentioned programmable privacy earlier the ability to have a mix of private data and public data all in the same smart contract as far as I know you can't do that with zkp right now in addition because tees have been around for such a long time that they are battle hardened you know they've been tested banks have been using them to move their data around for a long long time um and zkps they will get there FH will get there but I think the um uh they've got to go through a process of um Bassel hardening really they need to become more commonplace all the bugs need to be flushed out so that technology will get there but not just yet I think te is the solution for now um so we so when you're using trusted execution inv re ments the reality is you can actually achieve something very much akin to access control for your data on a blockchain so let's let's forget about the Privacy uh label for now let's just consider you've got a ton of data on the blockchain and you want Alice to see it but you don't want Bob to see it and that right now is impossible on ethereum but if you're using a if you're running an evm within a trusted execution environment then actually you can start having that distinction you you are providing Access Control to that data on the blockchain your computations that happening within that trusted environment are trusted and when I and that's important because when you consider um you know you you want to be moving money around you want to be doing significant transactions you need to be able to trust not just you but even the uh Regulators want to be able to trust that what's happening within that encryption environment is what you say is happening so if you run it in a in this ring fenced Enclave we know that nobody can access it we know the the the server operator can't access it we know there's no human beings that can access it therefore you you've got trusted computation again you're you're running software in a trustworthy way uh scalable and efficient I I think we can argue that um that tees are uh they're going to help um with with a with a sensible Cloud deployment of tees they're going to be able to run um far more complex software than other uh encryption Alternatives uh and when you look at who's using uh trusted execution environments it is the banks it's the global institutions and they've ticked off on using Intel sgx in their environment so there's already an element of approval achieved for this kind of Technology so let's get back around to why we started this whole conversation tees and web 3 do we think there's something there well I think I think it's a perfect match I think it's it's a match made in heaven you you're providing web 3 developers with the power that web 2 developers take for granted right now so let's think about why te and web 3 make sense let's consider AI agents um I imagine a world where we live in where we all have personal AI agents so I've uploaded a whole ton of data to an AI agent and it's making decisions on my behalf you know I want to go and buy a new pair of trainers don't know what to buy AI agent will help me make a decision it's only going to know those kind of things or if I've got health issues it's only going to know those things if I've provided a lot of sensitive information to that AI agent and so if you're now running AI agents and you're keeping the data private on the blockchain then on ethereum then you'll be able to um um keep that data just to yourself and to your AI agent similarly with oracles so you can have a data Oracle but you're only providing that data to people that pay for it so take Netflix for example Netflix wouldn't be making billions of dollars of Revenue every year if we could all see the data that they're streaming you know if you're watching Netflix and you want to watch it too you don't you don't want him paying to watch what you've paid for so there has to be a degree of um uh confidentiality or a degree of encryption or a degree of Access Control to be able to achieve that and we can do that with with tees Innovative def5 so I talked about me protection but things like dark pool trading things like private trading strategies um identity management so uh being able to keep um your identity in a safe environment so you you can you're not having to repeatedly provide the same identity information but you're keeping it private um and then on chain games and on chain games is quite interesting because when you think about most games there's a degree of um incomplete information games there might be a map that you have to reveal or there might be some cards that your player has that you don't have so it's incomplete information not every game is a game of chess so you need to have if you're ever going to get to the point where you've got fully onchain games there does have to be an element of hidden information for example some of you might be familiar with battleships so battleships is a game from the 1980s two players one player would hide some ships on their board and you'd have to try and hit their ships and the the hidden data element there is quite obvious it it's the ships what isn't quite so obvious is the public information so the public information is uh we both need to know where those hits are going I need to know so I can say whether it's blown up my ship and you need to know where my ship is or in or is not in the game and you could achieve that with a smart contract running within a trusted execution environment that's running the entire evm because your smart contracts can provide both public and private information and then well this is web 3 right why don't we scale it up to a few thousand people and those few thousand people are trying to hit the ships that are hidden within the smart contract and suddenly you have quite an interesting an interesting game that's not been seen before on ethereum so at 10 we think that tees are the means to unlock the true potential of ethereum the means to unlock web 3 uh definitely in the near term we'll see what happens in the next three four five years but for now it's uh it's time for tea in web 3 [Applause] thanks wow what a session um and we have time we actually have um couple minutes for questions guys so any questions from the audience I'm sure someone has a question I've got a question um are you going to be around this when when are you leaving Napoli first of all fairly shortly oh you're not flying this evening are you you're going straight to token a few of us in the team are also heading off to token but I think um what's really interesting I think for the project is I'm sure you guys have heard about te's but to see it in the capacity that you've just explained to us today so I suppose what I would love to to ask is maybe something you know that you can tell us about 10 something that maybe's launching this year for you guys something behind the curtain that we you know maybe a little bit of a little bit of uh mic drop maybe before we finish the day um well I guess I guess the The Thanks James good question I think um I guess the timings is relevant so we've uh Ten's been in testet for about a year um we're getting over 8 million daily interactions on there so we're definitely kicking the tires um so uh we should be launching their main product in well code freeze in November early November you know hopefully 6 weeks after that we'll go live but I guess um I guess some of the launch steps are interesting so um we're talking to a a Launchpad who would be able to have um uh you know you can actually have a have a degree of privacy about your your involvement within that within that launch we've got a couple of dexes on there as well so they'll be launching with us and dexes that are bringing new new innovative ways to um uh to to make use of dii um so yeah that's it's going to be a busy couple of months for us yeah sounds like it and um it's always busy when you're attending events isn't it I mean it's it's full on also is there a screen there where people can connect with you on perhaps on Twitter or telegram is or oh there we go I love it you got to have a shield at the end you know if you go there then you'll find all the yeah big round of applause there for thanks cheers guys we've actually