A Secure and Efficient Bitcoin Payment Channel Using Intel SGX

Hardware trusted execution environment (TEE) provided by Intel SGX enclave has been introduced in existing payment channel schemes as a root-of-trust to enforce faithful protocol execution so that participants do not need to monitor Bitcoin blockchain anymore. However, the security of these schemes relies totally on enclaves. Since private keys of all channel funds are kept by both payment channel participants’ enclaves, a malicious participant can steal funds from the counterparty by defeating her own enclave. To solve the above problem, we present a novel TEE-based payment channel scheme that transfers the responsibility of running enclaves from participants to a third party committee, while relieving both participants from monitoring the blockchain at the same time. Furthermore, since committee members can try to steal funds by defeating their own enclaves, we exploit the additive homomorphic property of signature keys in Elliptic Curve Cryptography to design a novel secret sharing scheme to tolerate a subset of committee members to be malicious. By using the above secret sharing scheme, private keys of the channel funds are never constructed in any committee member’s enclave, so that a malicious committee member cannot steal funds by defeating his own enclave. Finally, experiment shows our scheme can ensure payment channel funds security without efficient compromises compared with existing TEE-based payment channel schemes.