Microsoft Patents Hint At Using Trusted Computing Techniques To Boost Blockchain Security
As per the latest filings submitted to the U.S Patents and Trademark Office (USPTO), tech giant Microsoft has recently filed for two patents as the company looks to further strengthen its blockchain solutions by the use trusted execution environments (TEEs).
The two patent applications talk about the use of TEEs to further improve security within the consortium of blockchain network wherein some specific nodes are endorsed and required to act as validator nodes on the blockchain network.
A “TEE attestation” in the blockchain network will also be able to verify the participants of the system who poses matching information that is held within the node. The first patent filing indicates the use if TEEs for improving the security of the blockchain network in the following manner. It says:
“In one example of the technology, a first node is endorsed. During endorsement of a first node, a pre-determined type of blockchain or other security protocol code to be authorized and a pre-determined membership list may be stored in a trusted execution environment (TEE) of the first node.”
The patent application notes that in addition to a membership list or a specified protocol, a TEE can store multiple other aspects of the network.
The second patent highlights that a TEE can also cater to verifying blockchain transactions on a consortium of networks. The same TEE attestations will also generate a trestles environment wherein the other validator nodes would “not need to do re-computation for verification,” but would instead allow a given pre-authorized entity to “directly” broadcast the “updated official state” of a given processed transaction. The patent application notes:
“In some examples, the entire network accepts the transactions, including chaincode transactions, and blockchain states are directly updated. In some examples, there is no need for a copy of the transaction in order to confirm a block.”
Both these patent filings note the process of TEE attestation a "Confidential Consortium (COCO) Blockchain framework” which allows the verification of more complex systems that allows for getting the consensus of a multiplicity of validation nodes.
Apart from these patents, Microsoft announced last week that its Ethereum-based Azure platform has replaced the existing Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism by the Proof-of-Authority (PoA) algorithm. The tech giants says that the new PoA algorithm will surely improve the efficiency of developing decentralized applications (DApps) for private as well as consortium blockchain networks.