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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @phlip9 5 Oct 2023 \ parent \ on: We're Max Fang and Philip Hayes, co-founders of Lexe (lexe.app). AMA bitcoin
yeah i know Kostas came from Corda -- great guy. think he's now chief cryptographer @ Sui, working on (more) interesting zk stuff :P
There are definitely security tradeoffs here -- I'm somewhat more confident
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The user nodes are never exposed to the public internet, which removes a huge class of attack vectors. All inbound connections are either from our LSP (inside the same VPC) or our gateway proxy, which authenticates the user connections. Standard hot wallets are notoriously problematic here.
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All communication user app <-> node enclave are e2e encrypted+authenticated. Provisioned seeds/keys are never exposed to Lexe.
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User nodes won't provision secrets unless it's to Lexe-signed enclaves running on our infra (among other things)
As far as features this enables:
- I think there are some cool additional payment products we can enable, like subscriptions, automatic weekly remittance payments, etc... That'll always work even if you're on vacation or you lose your phone :)
oh we support both iOS and Android! @MaxFangX and I both use Android phones primarily
I'll update the site so it's clearer...
Self-custodial w/o compromises is absolutely what we're aiming for.
As far as SGX security, Intel has been pretty good about releasing mitigations and TCB recoveries in a timely manner. Usually that means we need to change a few compiler flags in exchange for reduced performance or update some certs. Running on the most recent Intel CPUs also helps a lot here. When the Lexe app wants to provision keys to the node, it can check that nodes have mitigations applied, are running on recent hardware, etc...
At the end of the day, security isn't all-or-nothing and I think SGX gets us to a good middle ground.
funny story, myself and 3 other ppl pitched David Marcus on integrating lightning into Messenger/WhatsApp in like October 2018, rather than building our own blockchain (DIem/Libra). in hindsight, I don't think LN was ready at the time. but pretty funny how things ended up w/ Lightspark and all
Hey all, @phlip9 here. AMA about Lexe, crypto, Intel SGX, or the reproducible user node builds I added a few days ago (just
nix build .#node-release-sgx
) :)GENESIS