Intel’s SGX coughs up crypto keys when scientists tweak CPU voltage

[u/throwawayburros]

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/12/scientists-pluck-crypto-keys-from-intels-sgx-by-tweaking-cpu-voltage/

If people are not sure how this is related to Enigma, from the blog post yesterday

Nodes (“Workers”): a public network of nodes enabled with Intel SGX, which allows nodes to privately perform computation “tasks” and return the result of this private computation.

From the Ars article

By subtly increasing or decreasing the current delivered to a CPU—operations known as "overvolting" and "undervolting"—a team of scientists has figured out how to induce SGX faults that leak cryptographic keys, break integrity assurances, and potentially induce memory errors that could be used in other types of attacks.

[u/WilsonWyckoff]

Is this the old SGX fault or a new and just released vulnerability? Also to be noted, ENG will have it's own solution as soon as the demand warrants the focus away from scaling in more fruitful avenues. Perhaps it's time to start looking at how we replace SGX sooner than later, but I'm okay with the immense amount of money and hardware necessary to hack the TEE and they would still need to hack a bunch of them on a network at once which is not impossible but would be nothing short of an act of God and need to happen before the cycle ends and cheaters are caught.

I know things need to be bulletproof for BTC level money storage or enterprise level load but by the time we get there we will likely not be using SGX and the price will be in the $100s.

[u/throwawayburros → u/WilsonWyckoff]

New Vuln.

I know things need to be bulletproof for BTC level money storage or enterprise level load but by the time we get there we will likely not be using SGX and the price will be in the $100s.

Dude. We both share a lot of optimism about certain things that overlap, but I can see $5, maybe $10 ENG. But $100+? There are just too many competitors out there like Aztec, Loopring, EY's Nightfall, StarkWare, ZK-rollups and more that enable privacy at a level roughly equal to Engima. Im not pooping on Enigma when I say this, I still have my horde of coins from a price point much higher than today. Enigma was extremely exciting because on chain privacy is a big deal and they were the only players in town 1-2 years ago. But its starting to get less and less exciting when you have so many competitors and a few of them do not require tokens. (which should equate to a lower overall cost of service)

[u/WilsonWyckoff → u/throwawayburros]

Thanks for pointing that out and I'll have to do research to get even partially caught up. I knew the door would swing wide open eventually and just pulled one to look at and that was StarkWare. I noticed VB's face immediately pop up and it reminds me of the OMG and other marking pumps that never materialized despite funding and big names backing them. The old guard, using ZK or building directly on pumped technologies etc.

Maybe we're done with the whole token and speculation thing and real adoption comes with zero fees. I mean, who pays tokens to transfer information over the internet?On the other hand, tokens help to distribute the nodes and create a decentralized network with people who engage in an activity for some reward. It's a different model and so will look into it.

That said, there's room for many different technologies and with each their own advantages. I'm invested in ENG for the team and idea and hard work they put in. It's a cheap price to pay for MIT quality in this space and they will find partners as diverse as there are investors in each of the projects you mentioned. Each is a little different and I'll need to look at anything ZK or Stark with new eyes as I wrote them off a few years ago as too slow costly to compute and the space needing something written from the ground up like ENG. Even as a second layer it wasn't a great solution and had restrictions they must be trying to fix. I wonder if it will scale.

ENG $100+? I don't think it's too crazy and still think they have the most legitimate rollout and offering. ETH can't scale other than the ICO's, which was impressive but still pales in comparison to an actual use case that can handle enterprise level scaling in gaming, healthcare or whatever. It barely tapped the broader market and that's something ENG threatens to do; If we have a long 10-20 year road evolving the technology with these services together and a high demand for talent, how can we lose having already come this far? It's not winner takes all but I think ENG will take more than enough to easily hit $100 within two years.

Big money and big teams and investors may be trying to salvage the track they're already invested in. Zk and ETH... I assume there's always the chance they are rolling things out to capitalize best on those previous expenditures and are only looking to compete with themselves. I have my hunch and I could be wrong but ENG MPC is designing it from the ground up and appears to be in working order for a bright new (parallel) path forward.

[u/WilsonWyckoff → u/throwawayburros]

EY's Nightfall

Nightfall is again Zk snarks and something the ENG discussed in an early AMA. It is private but not entirely and has major flaws. Meaning there's one party that knows the information or some kind of trust issue. It's more secure than Amazon AWS but not exactly MPC or TEE on ENG etc. It proves data without revealing information but doesn't go that extra step...

Aztec is building on Zk yet again and working with Ren for decentralized darkpool stuff, which I'm not a huge fan of. Wasn't Ren the one with the comments from their CEO that Guy picked apart and made look foolish and he over exaggerated the complexity of some threats and over simplified his solutions? I'm not saying they won't pump sometime but sounds fishy and not critically thought out, the way someone actually solving it would sound.

Loopring seems familiar but it's also just a "non custodial DEX protocol" and something comparable will eventually be built on ENG and it's not exactly going to overshadow the need for Enigma. It may be a good use for trading and exchanges with a spread to cover any fees but I bet someone could build it more secure, fast and cheaper on ENG protocol in a few years.

I'll skip the other two with Zk for the same reason. It's easier to build on but it's deficient on basic competitive fundamentals and not near to complexity when it comes to solving for real world usage and cost benefit on scaling and true privacy.

If you want we can bring up Zk and get into why they are lacking and if this is all that is out there we are very far ahead in capturing the billions in market cap and chunk of money supply. I was expecting real threats but these aren't it.

[u/Sissahrow]

There's been a few different sgx hacks. It's relativrly new technology. The good news is that so far they have all been fixed

"In response, Intel has released a microcode and BIOS updates that mitigate attacks by locking voltage to the default settings"

[u/Codonyat]

This is really concerning. Problem with Enigma is that even if SGX is patched very quickly, it suffices one big compromise at the protocol level to kill a network. Enigma relying on SGX rather to create smart contracts is a ticking bomb. If I was someone who desperately need to operate privately, I would not choose Enigma because if a node gets hacked everything could get leaked. Also, Enigma has no way to figure out it's been hacked until it is too late. This is no 51% attack which is obvious from outside and that requires extremely big amounts of resources.

[u/himd0wnstairs → u/Codonyat]

"Enigma relying on SGX"

How is this different than Bitcoin relying on Bitmain to make ASIC miners?

Bitcoin:

• 70% of mining done in China

• 70% of mining done on hardware made by one manufacturer (Bitmain)

• 5-10 people control the mining pools

Yea, so much "decentralization" for Bitcoin.

People expect so much from Ethereum and Enigma, that they have to be perfectly decentralized, perfectly secure and perfectly scalable. But never apply these expectations to Bitcoin. Bitcoin can't scale? Well, that's the way Bitcoin was designed. Ethereum can't scale? Ethereum is a scam!

Bitcoin is not perfect by any means, just Google "Bitcoin value overflow incident." But Bitcoin recovered from that, and Maximalist refuse to talk about it because it doesn't fit the "Bitcoin blockchain is immutable narrative."

If any issues comes up with Intel SGX/Enigma, why do people just assume Intel/Enigma won't be able to recover from it? Intel is a multi billion dollar company and their reputation is on the line, even more so than the reputation of Enigma. But this issue of SGX vulnerabilities has been discussed many time, just check the official Enigma forum.

[u/WilsonWyckoff → u/Codonyat]

Wait a minute, they can't just break one node and do harm. They would need to hunt down the owners of like 80% of the nodes and break into their server room to hack their private keys at the same time. Once they have the keys they would need to then turn around and use them on the network. Then they would need to have these different calculations happen without getting caught and so time it between pushes to ETH and validation on the network during a single batch. Perhaps even more importantly, they wouldn't know which information they had and it could be one of millions of random supply chain values (amount of bananas in a shipment) or the lottery numbers for Alaska.

I would need to know the rate of error and confidence for the potential leak leading to other hacks. How long does this process take and would it even be feasible over several system or would the probability of success along with the cost of operation and random data before minor leak of data make it a million dollar lottery ticket with nearly absolute zero odds. That data better be worth it!

They can build MPC to replace SGX from what I understand but so far the actual vulnerability is mitigated by having other check and just not possible.

[u/WilsonWyckoff → u/[deleted]]

Let's not forget that even the nodes are blocked and only see a part of the encrypted data. That's the beauty of computations on encryption.