A blockchain-based platform for decentralized trusted computing

doi:10.1007/s12083-024-01668-0

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A blockchain-based platform for decentralized trusted computing

2024-03-02

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Yihuai Liang

Yan Li

Byeong‐Seok Shin *

DOI：10.1007/s12083-024-01668-0

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Abstract

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Security and availability are crucial for users who outsource computational tasks to remote servers. However, computation services provided by cloud platforms suffer outage risks, potential enforced censorship, and network latency problems due to the centralized architecture, also having monopolistic service prices.We proposed a decentralized platform for outsourced trusted computing. Compared with prior works, our platform works autonomously based on a public blockchain without reliance on a trusted third party. The platform is open and public for computation nodes of Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) to join and provide trusted computing services out of financial incentives. Moreover, we designed a novel protocol, named b-DTC. First, it prevents free-riding behaviors against users and prevents false reporting against computing nodes. Second, it supports real-time multi-round off-chain trusted computing in a pay-as-you-go manner, such that the performance of outsourced computing is not limited by the underlying blockchain. Third, for an incentive of high reliability and availability, it trustworthily measures the liveness, workload, and performance of the nodes and uses the measurement information to calculate the nodes' reputation. We analyzed and proved the security of our protocol. Extensive experiments are conducted based on two real-world scenarios: a clinical self-diagnosis system and an outsourced genetic testing application. Experimental results show that our system is feasible and the cost of introducing blockchain and TEE into our system is acceptable: Only takes about 20 seconds more than that of a cloud to finish a task that provides trusted service for 1000 users; The off-chain computing cost in our system is only about 20% more than that of the cloud.

Keywords:

Trusted computing

Blockchain

Trusted execution environment