Chainlink and the Trusted Compute Framework

Does Chainlink have the potential to create the most secure encryption algorithm in the world?

Note: If you’re not familiar with Chainlink, make sure to go through my previous article first: “Chainlink: A Fundamental Analysis”.

Before we start, here are some key terms to know:

Blockchains are essentially very secure, distributed, and decentralized databases.

Smart contracts are lines of code that automatically execute a function when given an input — just like a vending machine.

Chainlink is a form of digital infrastructure that secures data transmission.

Intel recently released an article detailing the TCF using Chainlink to improve the integrity of off-chain oracles. Chainlink has 3 contributors that will contribute to the TCF’s plans for how to integrate with decentralized oracles and attested oracles, which will be able to provide both TCF computations and various on-chain computations enabled by them with secure access to various key API inputs and enterprise/payment event outputs. This new blogpost confirms that Chainlink will play a vital role in the routing of off-chain data to the TCF.

Creating a TCF Request | Credit:@kyleodesign

Chainlink will allow off-chain computations in the Trusted Compute Framework to become trusted on-chain. This will greatly enhance TCF’s efficiency. This also allows for confidential contracts which can be executed off-chain faster and cheaper than on-chain without compromising their security. Chainlink brings the data that these contracts need to execute and transfers the required data to initiate settlement onto payment rails. It then pegs a receipt of the contract’s execution to the public chain as well as the metrics about the quality of the off-chain Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) workers.

Consuming a TCF Result | Credit:@kyleodesign

The purpose of the public chain with the incorporation of TCF is to maintain a record of contract outcomes, such as the amount of successes, fails, or other outcomes along with a list of TEE workers, which will be very cost effective for enterprises who now no longer have to maintain those records themselves and spend money reconciling disparate records.

TCF Diagram | Credit:@kyleodesign

One exciting application that could be used with the TCF and Chainlink is randomness generation in Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), such as using Town Crier with Intel SGX.

Truly random numbers are absolutely required to be assured of the theoretical security provided by a one-time pad (OTP) — the only provably unbreakable encryption algorithm. One-time pads are basically a bunch of random strings. They are unbreakable if the sender and receiver keep the random strings completely secret, and use them to encrypt messages. Essentially, the nth value of the one-time pad is added to the nth character of a message. Previously, this could only be truly secure if the two parties agreed on the one-time pad offline, which is a major hurdle when it comes to online trust.

Cryptography relies on random numbers to create security. Right now everything from cryptocurrency transactions, PayPal transactions, banking logins, email logins, encrypted messengers, along with every other sensitive digital communication, rely on cryptographic keys obtained by random number generation. One approach to break cryptographic security is to figure out how a particular random number generator makes random numbers and reverse engineer cryptographic keys, such as private keys.

With Chainlink, one could have many nodes sending out random strings to smart contracts, which then create one-time pads for users to encrypt their communication. Then, the TCF and its TEE workers ensure that the trusted hardware creates truly random data, and the oracle node operators relaying this data wouldn’t even know what that data is.

This would allow for a 100% truly trustless, decentralized, economically-incentivized, and publicly available random number generator (RNG). It could make the one-time pad go from a theoretical cryptographic “holy-grail” academic concept, to a cheap, publicly accessible RNG tool that anyone can use. It could also make an easily generated OTP the cryptographic standard for an unbreakable form of cryptography that you could pull from the Chainlink network. Using Chainlink with the TCF, TEEs, and RNGs has the potential to make a practically impossible to hack random number generator, creating the most secure encryption algorithm that the world has ever seen, while simultaneously making genuine, “trustless” symmetric-key cryptography viable. The implications of this are innumerable and staggering.

If successful and widely used, the TCF has the potential to become the HTTPS/TLS/SSL of blockchain. It brings privacy and scalability into public chains and has massive corporate sponsors such as Intel, Alibaba Cloud, EEA, IBM, Microsoft, Banco Santander, and Oracle, just to name a few. This framework, along with innovations like Chainlink’s Mixicles, allows for the ultimate realization of blockchain which is private data on public networks, just like the internet. At the moment, the TCF is one of the most important projects for mainstream enterprise adoption of blockchain technology.