EncELC: Hardening and Enriching Ethereum Light Clients with Trusted Enclaves

Abstract

The rapid growth of Ethereum blockchain has brought extremely heavy overhead for coin owners or developers to bootstrap and access transactions on Ethereum. To address this, light client is enabled, which only stores a small fraction of blockchain data and relies on bootstrapped full nodes for transaction retrievals. However, because the retrieval requests are outsourced, it raises several severe concerns about the integrity of returned results and the leakage of sensitive blockchain access histories, largely hindering the wider adoption of this important lightweight design. In addition to security issues, the continuously increasing blockchain storage also urges for more effective query functionalities for the Ethereum blockchain, so as to enable more flexible and precise transaction retrievals.In this paper, we propose EncELC, a new Ethereum light client design that enforces full-fledged protections for clients and enables rich queries over the Ethereum blockchain. EncELC leverages trusted hardware (e.g., Intel SGX) as a starting point for building efficient yet secure processing, and further crafts several crucial performance and security refinement designs to boost query efficiency and conceal leakages inside and outside SGX enclave. We implement a prototype of EncELC and test its performance in several real settings, and the results have confirmed the practicality of EncELC.