Tesseract: Real-Time Cryptocurrency Exchange using Trusted Hardware

Iddo Bentov; Yan Ji; Fan Zhang; Yunqi Li; Xueyuan Zhao; Lorenz Breidenbach; Philip Daian; Ari Juels

Paper 2017/1153

Tesseract: Real-Time Cryptocurrency Exchange using Trusted Hardware

Iddo Bentov, Yan Ji, Fan Zhang, Yunqi Li, Xueyuan Zhao, Lorenz Breidenbach, Philip Daian, and Ari Juels

Abstract

We propose Tesseract, a secure real-time cryptocurrency exchange service. Existing centralized exchange designs are vulnerable to theft of funds, while decentralized exchanges cannot offer real-time cross-chain trades. All currently deployed exchanges are also vulnerable to frontrunning attacks. Tesseract overcomes these flaws and achieves a best-of-both-worlds design by using Intel SGX as a trusted execution environment. Furthermore, by running a consensus protocol among SGX-enabled servers, Tesseract mitigates denial-of-service attacks. Tesseract supports not only real-time cross-chain cryptocurrency trades, but also secure tokenization of assets pegged to cryptocurrencies. For instance, Tesseract-tokenized bitcoins can circulate on the Ethereum blockchain for use in smart contracts. We provide a reference implementation of Tesseract that supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, and similar cryptocurrencies.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords: cryptocurrency fairness consensus trusted hardware attested execution
Contact author(s): iddobentov @ cornell edu
History: 2018-07-03: revised; 2017-11-28: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2017/1153
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2017/1153,
      author = {Iddo Bentov and Yan Ji and Fan Zhang and Yunqi Li and Xueyuan Zhao and Lorenz Breidenbach and Philip Daian and Ari Juels},
      title = {Tesseract: Real-Time Cryptocurrency Exchange using Trusted Hardware},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2017/1153},
      year = {2017},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1153}
}