Leveraging Intel SGX to enable trusted and privacy preserving membership service in distributed ledgers

Abstract

Distributed ledger technology (DLT) provides decentralised services by removing the need of trust among distributed nodes in the distributed system. Transactions across the network are visible to all participants. However, some transactions may contain sensitive information such as business contracts or even personal health records. To protect user privacy, the architecture of distributed multi-channel ledger with membership service as a critical component can be adopted. The proposed multi-channel membership service architecture combines two promising technologies, distributed ledger and Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX). With SGX remote attestation and isolated execution, each node is enrolled as a trusted entity to the channels, which separate different applications and provide better flexibility. We propose security properties for membership service in distributed ledger and illustrate how SGX help to achieve these properties in each phase. Security analysis and evaluation show that the proposed architecture could enhance the privacy preservation and capabilities against attacks.