There are many magical black boxes in cryptography – ZK, MPC, TEE, IBE, witness encryption, FHE, and threshold schemes, aiming to solve the problem of public block space and lack of privacy. While we all believe our own chosen technology to be the next best thing, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Each of these cryptography schemes solves a different problem, all with different engineering and security trade-offs. Yet, most interestingly, these solutions can be combined to solve even harder and specific problems.
The challenge all of the confidential computing projects face is putting these cryptographic tools in the hands of developers and users. Specifically those outside of the layer 1 ecosystem that is providing this functionality. The question becomes, how can we bring encryption utilities to other ecosystems, such as major EVM L1 and L2s, so that they too can enjoy the wealth of use cases and novel applications that (temporary) private blockspace brings to the table.
An example of of how Secret provides confidential computation tooling to Polygon.
The Partnership
SCRT Labs and Fairblock are joining forces under the Confidential Computing Constellation to create an advanced tooling set that combines the core technologies of Fairblock and Secret Network: Multi Party Computation such IBE and FHE, and Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). We believe combining these technologies parallel to each other and/or vertically within the same base layer will significantly increase the usability, composability and security of the complete stack. There is a wide range of applications from infrastructure mechanism design, DeFi and governance to distributed content and DePIN that can be powered by this combined tooling.
The focus of this partnership will be performing research and development of cryptographic solutions that do not rely on centralized parties, nor solely trust a decentralized committee nor a hardware element. We believe that industry leaders should work together to introduce the next generation of cryptographic schemes which are more resilient and decentralized for the near future when we are deploying our sensitive infrastructure and financial mechanism on blockchains. Our goal will be to implement such solutions as primitives or building blocks that can be deployed in Major EVM chains such Ethereum, Polygon, Arbtirum, OP Stack, Rollkit, as well all as on Cosmos Appchains.
The first initiative of this partnership will be decryption of threshold IBE and FHE inside SGX. This solution will enable users and developers to send encrypted transactions and compute over them on any ecosystem while the key generation and decryption process will be performed by using Fairblock and Secret technology in concert. While this solution unlocks a new wave of design and applications in practical and modular way, it will have the strongest form of security by combining the assumptions of TEEs and MPCs.
Some of the potential application of this technology may include:
Sealed-bid auctions and other intents based mechanisms which require symmetrical information access, FHE rollups with encryption and threshold decryption of results, front-running and censorship resistant sequencing, gaming with shared private states, and private governance.
We are excited to embark on this research journey, promoting the spirit of collaboration and inclusiveness, and developing cutting edge solutions combining different privacy technologies. We are sure that the future of confidential computing lies in combining different privacy technologies, such as MPC, FHE, TEE and ZKPs to create robust and resilient solutions geared for mass adoption.
Join in on the discussion on the Secret Network community channels!
