Privacy was a blockchain paradox for a long time after the technology was first introduced. But as privacy-preserving solutions emerged and developed, it seemed the missing piece of the puzzle was finally at hand. Trusted Execution Environments or TEEs are one of the most prominent privacy-preserving techniques used today.

TEEs vis-à-vis other privacy solutions

While the suitability of TEEs in complex decentralized and confidential computations makes them preferable compared to Zero Knowledge Proofs or ZKPs, the USP remains the flexibility of TEEs to combine with other privacy tools to produce robust solutions.

Still, the fact remains that while ZKPs and other privacy solutions garnered attention, TEEs remained in the periphery. This has finally changed thanks to consistent awareness built by blockchain protocols like Oasis.

Future is TEEs

Oasis has not only simplified the understanding of TEEs as the black box for smart contract execution, but they have also made TEEs the core component of end-to-end encryption in the confidential computation space.

In addition, Oasis is contributing heavily in researching how TEEs play a crucial role as the optimal infrastructure in building the next-gen web3 and AI.

Why and how remote attestation is integral to TEEs

For the developers familiar with TEEs, remote attestation needs no introduction. It is the mechanism that drives the security aspect of TEEs by enhancing integrity and trust. It works in tandem with reproducible builds that underline the obvious but critical function of verifying that software built from the same source code always produces identical binaries. Combined together, they are basically what makes TEEs tick.

When working with VMs and cryptography, as blockchain protocols do, TEEs can become quickly vulnerable without remote attestation working perfectly. This becomes even more significant in the working of the Runtime Offchain Logic or ROFL framework built by Oasis for developing and deploying TEE-based applications.

Trust but verify is, thus, far easier said than done. Then where do we go from here? Recently, Oasis Foundation Director, Jernej Kos did a deep dive technical analysis on the remote attestation process.

Now that it is verified that TEEs are better and safer with remote attestation, we can all start to believe in on-chain trust for tomorrow's dApps with off-chain performance in focus, too. Start Buidl-ing!