We are thrilled to announce that Automata has joined the Confidential Computing Consortium as the most recent Startup member and brings their expertise in machine attestation and secure computation to our community. Automata is a machine attestation layer built by humans and designed for machines. It performs verifiable computation over stateless data using secure hardware, extending machine trust to Ethereum with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), also called TEE Coprocessors.
Why TEE Coprocessors?
TEEs are a cornerstone of confidential computing. They create a secure enclave by encrypting the hardware memory, allowing us to guarantee the integrity and confidentiality of computations performed by a TEE.
- Integrity: TEEs verify that the data and code being run are authentic. Through remote attestation, we can be confident that computations are executed by a genuine TEE.
- Confidentiality: TEEs provide technical assurance that untrusted parties protect computations from access.
Coprocessors extend blockchain functionality by performing off-chain computations over on-chain data within a parallel environment—in this case, a TEE. Our experience with TEEs on the blockchain, from moving TEE stack components on-chain to designing and deploying TEE-backed applications, has shown that secure hardware is a practical and promising way to handle workloads in a decentralized setting.
Automata and Confidential Computing
Recently, Automata has made significant advancements in on-chain computation. We have implemented what we believe to be the first complete DCAP attestation workflow on the blockchain, allowing for the caching of attestation collaterals in a decentralized repository that the community can contribute to and maintain.
Additionally, we introduced Multi-Prover AVS on EigenLayer, a restaking protocol that enhances the security of rollups with a secondary TEE Prover. Our work with TEEs demonstrates the feasibility of using secure hardware as the building blocks for interacting with blockchains, upholding core values of openness and verifiability.
This aligns with the spirit of the Confidential Computing Consortium. We are excited about the renewed energy around confidential computing. We are committed to contributing to the long-term success of TEEs as the de-facto medium of computational integrity on the web. We also aim to motivate further research into trust-minimized, confidential implementations for both applications and infrastructure.
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