A Distributed Oracle Using Intel SGX for Blockchain-Based IoT Applications

• Main Authors: Sangyeon Woo, Jeho Song, Sungyong Park
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-05-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: blockchain; blockchain oracle; ethereum; Internet of Things; smart contracts
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/9/2725

A <i>blockchain oracle problem</i> is a problem that defines a mechanism for how to safely bring external data to the blockchain. Although there have been various research efforts to solve this problem, existing solutions are limited in that they do not support either data availability or data integrity. Furthermore, no solution has been proposed to minimize the response time when an oracle server is malicious or overloaded. This paper proposes a distributed oracle using Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX). The proposed approach uses multiple oracle servers to support data availability. It also supports data integrity using Intel SGX and Transport Layer Security (TLS) communication. The reputation system, which favors oracle servers with short response times, minimizes the average response time even if some of the oracle servers are malicious. The benchmarking results show that the response time of the proposed approach with 3 oracle servers is only 14% slower than a centralized oracle called Town-crier and scales well even if the number of oracle servers is increased up to 9. The reputation system is also evaluated, and its feasibility is analyzed using various experiments.