Airtnt: Fair Exchange Payment for Outsourced Secure Enclave Computations

Abstract

We present Airtnt, a novel scheme that enables users with CPUs that support Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and remote attestation to rent out computing time on secure enclaves to untrusted users. Airtnt makes use of the attestation capabilities of TEEs and smart contracts on distributed ledgers to guarantee the fair exchange of the payment and the result of an execution. Airtnt makes use of off-chain payment channels to allow requesters to pay executing nodes for intermediate "snapshots" of the state of an execution. Effectively, this step-by-step "compute-payment" cycle realises untrusted pay-as-you-go micropayments for computation. Neither the requester nor the executing node can walk away and incur monetary loss to the other party. This also allows requesters to continue executions on other executing nodes if the original executing node becomes unavailable or goes offline.