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Assaf retweeted
Here’s a hot take that might ruffle a few feathers: be careful dunking on TEEs just to make ZK/FHE look better.
There’s a new attack from wiretap (dot) fail that demonstrates a practical DRAM-bus interposition attack that extracts SGX attestation keys and forges quotes. This is a real, concrete break we should take seriously.
Does it mean we should punch down on TEEs? Probably not. A few loose thoughts:
1. Everything has vulnerabilities. Hardware, software, crypto libraries. None of it is magically immune.
2. TEEs have been around in various forms for much longer than ZK systems (TrustZone in mobile, DRM/payment chips, SGX since 2015). Because of this long history, researchers and adversaries alike better understand where to attack. That’s why we see a steady drumbeat of “another SGX exploit” headlines.
3. ZK systems, by comparison, are million-line libraries mostly with less than three years of production usage. They’re complex, evolving quickly, and their unknown unknowns are still waiting to be uncovered.
4. TEEs aren’t a static menu. SGX reflects one set of trade-offs. Other TEEs (your iPhone secure enclave, your bank card, your game console) make very different design choices, often prioritizing security over performance. The technology continues to evolve, and new, more secure options are already emerging.
5. Vulnerbilities will happen to ZK systems too. When they do, we shouldn’t cheer or gloat. Implementation is hard, and discovery of vulnerabilities is part of the maturation cycle.
The bigger point: TEEs aren’t finished products. They’re a technology frontier, just like FHE or ZK. We don’t dismiss FHE because today’s benchmarks look bad. We evaluate it based on where it can go. The same mindset should apply to TEEs. They’ll probably never offer the same security profile as FHE, but they’ll likely remain far more performant and can serve as useful complements.
And to be clear: this comes from someone who works across all three fronts. With EigenLayer and EigenCompute, we collaborate with TEE partners. With EigenDA, we work with ZK partners powering rollups. For slashing, we rely on reexecution consensus-based models where every Ethereum node replays the same code. Each of these approaches has different strengths and trade-offs, and each has a place. What shouldn’t become normalized is the idea that it’s fine to dunk on one camp as if it makes the others stronger.
The verifiable pie is small. We should be working to expand it, not punching each other down. Build, disclose responsibly, patch quickly, and lift each other up.
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Assaf retweeted
A vulnerability in certain Intel SGX hardware was disclosed by white hat researchers which affected multiple networks using TEE technology.
To our knowledge we are the only network which took proactive measures to mitigate the impact.
Please see our response in our blog:
scrt.network/blog/secret-net…
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Assaf retweeted
I am looking for a project or opportunity in web3 to put significant time towards next to my work for Lavender.Five
I come with backend/frontend experience, contacts to and opinions about 100+ chains/dApps and a friendly attitude towards sales and customer success
Hit me up 🙂
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Penumbra kicked the Secret community while it was down. Namada airdropped to Secret contributors.
Pretty clear which one is a true advocate for privacy.
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Assaf retweeted
No idea, but I have a list of things I think current incumbents might be dogmatic about at the end of the post:
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Assaf retweeted
Will the Iranian people seize this once in a generation opportunity and overthrow the Mullahs?
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Assaf retweeted
Imagine seeing the people of Iran root for Israel and still saying Israel is the bad guy
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Assaf retweeted
Strategy today announced the launch of $STRD ("Stride"), a new perpetual preferred stock offering, available to institutional investors and select non-institutional investors. For more information, click here. $MSTR strategy.com/press/strategy-…
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Assaf retweeted
an appchain developer’s dilemma:
→ uses cosmos-sdk
→ “wow so much flexibility”
→ “ugh scaffolding hell”
→ switches to smart contracts
→ “wow so simple”
→ “ugh too limited”
→ switches to cosmos-sdk
→ “wow so much flexibility”
→ … 🤷
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Assaf retweeted
Hackers use ThorSwap: *crypto twitter cries*
SUI freezes hacker funds: *crypto twitter cries*
SUI froze $160M from the Cetus hacker, on-chain, out of over $220M. The $60M gap was bridged to ETH.
While this is good in this case, this shows SUI network can freeze your funds on demand.
Decentralization is just marketing outside of BTC/ETH.
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Assaf retweeted
Yoav, 5 years old, waited a year and a half for his best friend, Ariel Bibas. He wrote him letters, saved a Batman costume for him for Purim, and kept asking, “When is Ariel coming back from Gaza?”
When his parents had to break the news that his friend would not be coming home alive, he looked at them and, with the innocence of a five-year-old, simply said, “My heart hurts.”
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otoh today I bridged ETH from Ethereum to Arbitrum One in just 36min
What IBC got wrong
Technical:
- unnecessary complexities: connections, channels, middlewares, ordered channels, the handshake process, requirement on inspecting self historical consensus state (removed recently, good!) These should all be deleted
- monolithic light client: state transition and state verification should be modularized, instead of forcing all Tendermint chains to use ICS-23
- commitment paths and hash algo shouldn't be preset by protocol. This makes EVM impl a lot more difficult for example (forced into sha256 instead of free to choose keccak - this is why union-ibc is not compatible with Eureka)
- ICS-20 and -27 are poorly designed: should merged into one, with multiple coins per packet, multihop and interchain query baked in
Business:
- taking years to painstakingly implement trust minimized light clients. Should instead quickly expand to as many chains as possible, grabbing the market share, even temporarily rely on trusted setups eg multisigs is ok
- too late toe expand to EVM, SVM
- ICF should have run a Bitcoin bridge with IBC API. Having native bitcoin before anyone else would have been huge
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Assaf retweeted
Instagram used Postgres, did they mention it? Nope.
Airbnb used Ruby on Rails - did they mention it? Maybe eventually, but definitely not in their launch.
Truth is, in @Cosmos we tend to over index on tech, while others just need it to work for their users.
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nonsense of the day
In case you missed it, @zama_fhe killed FHE today.
It’s dead. The field is dead. Their company is dead. It’s over.
FHE isn’t practical today, just like ZK wasn’t practical ten years ago. The only way it becomes practical is with sustained, intensive cryptographic work — work which is now legally uncertain, and hence uninvestable/unfundable.
FHE already had headwinds. Unlike ZK, which combined clear PMF, no competition, and a speculative bubble into an incredible technology development arc, FHE must compete with TEEs that provide practical functionality today, and will only get better over time. But having the entire field under threat of patent enforcement kills any hope of winning that competition.
@zama_fhe have poisoned their entire field, but they will not see the benefit either, as the technology is too immature for them to use. They will certainly fail to develop it alone, and they can be the petty tyrants of an empty kingdom.
It’s over. We will just use TEEs instead. Maybe, with a comparable amount of effort that would have gone into FHE practical, we can make them secure.
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