The Forking Way: When TEEs Meet Consensus
Annika Wilde
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2025 · Day 1 · Blockchain Security 1
In "The Forking Way: When TEEs Meet Consensus," Annika Wilde from Ruhr University Bochum presents a critical examination of the interplay between Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and blockchain consensus mechanisms, highlighting significant security vulnerabilities arising from their combination. The talk delves into how TEEs, which provide hardware-based isolation for sensitive computations, often fall short in guaranteeing input freshness, making them susceptible to **forking attacks**. Blockchains, designed for total ordering of events through consensus, are explored as a potential countermeasure, but their integration with TEEs introduces new complexities.
AI review
Solid academic security research with real teeth: three zero-days in production networks, a systematic taxonomy of forking mitigations, and an honest accounting of what each approach actually buys you. This is a PhD student doing work that production engineers at those networks missed — that's the signal.