Paper 2017/1153

Tesseract: Real-Time Cryptocurrency Exchange using Trusted Hardware

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

Abstract

We propose Tesseract, a secure real-time cryptocurrency exchange service. Centralized exchange designs are vulnerable to theft of funds, while decentralized exchanges cannot offer real-time cross-chain trades. All the existing exchanges are also vulnerable frontrunning attacks. Tesseract overcomes these flaws by using a trusted execution environment, specifically Intel SGX. The task of committing the recent trades data to independent cryptocurrency systems presents an all-or-nothing fairness problem, that can be solved by means of SPV proofs or multiple SGX-enabled servers. Tesseract also mitigates denial-of-service attacks by running a consensus protocol among SGX-enabled servers. Tesseract supports not only real-time cross-chain cryptocurrency trading, but also a secure method to tokenize assets pegged to various 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.