A niche corner of the Web3 world is increasingly making use of hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to build decentralized infrastructure. One of the motivations to use TEEs is to go beyond the current performance limitations of cryptography-based alternatives such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and multi-party computation (MPC). Despite their appealing advantages, current TEEs suffer from serious limitations as they are not secure against physical attacks, and their attestation mechanism is rooted in the chip manufacturer's trust. As a result, Web3 applications have to rely on cloud infrastruture to act as trusted guardians of hardware-based TEEs and have to accept to trust chip manufacturers. This work aims at exploring how we could potentially architect and implement chips that would be secure against physical attacks and would not require putting trust in chip manufacturers. One goal of this work is to motivate the Web3 movement to acknowledge and leverage the substantial amount of relevant hardware research that already exists. In brief, a combination of: (1) physical unclonable functions (PUFs) to secure the root-of-trust; (2) masking and redundancy techniques to secure computations; (3) open source hardware and imaging techniques to verify that a chip matches its expected design; can help move towards attesting that a given TEE can be trusted without the need to trust a cloud provider and a chip manufacturer.

翻译：Web3领域的一个细分角落正日益利用基于硬件的可信执行环境（TEE）来构建去中心化基础设施。使用TEE的动机之一是为了超越当前基于密码学的替代方案（如零知识证明（ZKP）、全同态加密（FHE）和安全多方计算（MPC））的性能限制。尽管具有诱人的优势，但当前的TEE存在严重局限：它们无法抵御物理攻击，且其认证机制植根于芯片制造商的信任。因此，Web3应用不得不依赖云基础设施作为基于硬件的TEE的可信守护者，并必须接受信任芯片制造商。本研究旨在探索如何从架构和实现层面设计能够抵御物理攻击且无需信任芯片制造商的芯片。本工作的目标之一是推动Web3运动认识并利用现有的大量相关硬件研究成果。简而言之，结合以下技术：（1）利用物理不可克隆函数（PUF）保护信任根；（2）采用掩码和冗余技术保障计算安全；（3）通过开源硬件与成像技术验证芯片是否符合预期设计；有助于实现无需信任云服务提供商和芯片制造商即可认证特定TEE可信度的目标。