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RaceTEE: Enabling Interoperability of Confidential Smart Contracts

Keyu Zhang, Andrew Martin

TL;DR

RaceTEE addresses privacy and scalability gaps in smart contracts by introducing an interoperable off-chain framework built on Trusted Execution Environments. It establishes a unified execution environment with dual-layer encryption, contract-consistent availability via competitive execution, and a global transaction order by treating each blockchain block as an atomic unit, while preserving compatibility with existing blockchains through on-chain management contracts. The authors implement a prototype using Intel SGX integrated with Ethereum, and demonstrate practical viability across token, DEX, auction, and computation workloads, including Go-based K-Means inside enclaves. They also detail security analyses and a distributed off-chain storage scheme with threshold-based confirmations to resist adversarial behavior. The work offers a path toward practical confidential, long-lived, inter-contract execution with broad applicability in DeFi, finance, and data-intensive applications, while outlining future work on formal security guarantees and large-scale deployment.

Abstract

Decentralized smart contracts enable trustless collaboration but suffer from limited privacy and scalability, which hinders broader adoption. Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) based off-chain execution frameworks offer a promising solution to both issues. Although TEE-based frameworks have made significant progress, prior work has yet to fully explore contract interoperability, a critical foundation for building complex real-world decentralized applications. This paper identifies the key challenges impeding such interoperability and presents practical solutions. Based on these insights, we introduce RaceTEE, a novel framework that leverages off-chain TEE-enabled nodes to efficiently execute confidential, long-lived smart contracts with interactions of arbitrary complexity among contracts. We implement a RaceTEE prototype using Intel SGX, integrate it with Ethereum, and release it as open source. Evaluation across diverse use cases demonstrates its practicality and effectiveness.

RaceTEE: Enabling Interoperability of Confidential Smart Contracts

TL;DR

RaceTEE addresses privacy and scalability gaps in smart contracts by introducing an interoperable off-chain framework built on Trusted Execution Environments. It establishes a unified execution environment with dual-layer encryption, contract-consistent availability via competitive execution, and a global transaction order by treating each blockchain block as an atomic unit, while preserving compatibility with existing blockchains through on-chain management contracts. The authors implement a prototype using Intel SGX integrated with Ethereum, and demonstrate practical viability across token, DEX, auction, and computation workloads, including Go-based K-Means inside enclaves. They also detail security analyses and a distributed off-chain storage scheme with threshold-based confirmations to resist adversarial behavior. The work offers a path toward practical confidential, long-lived, inter-contract execution with broad applicability in DeFi, finance, and data-intensive applications, while outlining future work on formal security guarantees and large-scale deployment.

Abstract

Decentralized smart contracts enable trustless collaboration but suffer from limited privacy and scalability, which hinders broader adoption. Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) based off-chain execution frameworks offer a promising solution to both issues. Although TEE-based frameworks have made significant progress, prior work has yet to fully explore contract interoperability, a critical foundation for building complex real-world decentralized applications. This paper identifies the key challenges impeding such interoperability and presents practical solutions. Based on these insights, we introduce RaceTEE, a novel framework that leverages off-chain TEE-enabled nodes to efficiently execute confidential, long-lived smart contracts with interactions of arbitrary complexity among contracts. We implement a RaceTEE prototype using Intel SGX, integrate it with Ethereum, and release it as open source. Evaluation across diverse use cases demonstrates its practicality and effectiveness.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 42 sections, 4 equations, 4 figures, 1 table, 2 algorithms.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Threat Model and Assumptions
  4. Assumptions
  5. TEEs
  6. Cryptographic Specification
  7. Threat Model
  8. Malicious Users
  9. Malicious Off-chain Node Hosts
  10. External Adversaries
  11. Design
  12. Overview
  13. Design Challenges
  14. Unified Execution Environment
  15. Contract Consistent Availability
  16. ...and 27 more sections

Figures (4)

  • Figure 1: High-Level Architecture of RaceTEE
  • Figure 2: Execution Flow of RaceTEE
  • Figure 3: End-to-end latency of four contract functions across three execution environments: (a) a forked Ethereum blockchain with a 12-second block interval; (b) a high-performance blockchain with a 3-second block interval; and (c) a purely TEE-based RacePro execution without blockchain involvement.
  • Figure 4: Cost comparison: (a) Cost of different requests, each executed once per block (log-scaled y-axis); (b) Cost of processing ERC-20 transfers as the number of requests per block increases; (c) Computation contract cost with varying input sizes (log-scaled x- and y-axes).