Research Directions for Verifiable Crypto-Physically Secure TEEs

Sylvain Bellemare argues that current hardware TEEs are not secure against physical attacks and rely on trust in chip manufacturers, so a different design is needed for trustworthy Web3 infrastructure. The paper says Web3 applications currently depend on cloud providers to act as trusted guardians of TEEs. It proposes combining three elements: physical unclonable functions to secure the root of trust, masking and redundancy techniques to protect computations, and open source hardware with imaging techniques to verify that a chip matches its expected design. The work also aims to get the Web3 movement to draw on existing hardware research.