With the advent of the digital age, data has become a core element of modern business and social operations. However, the processing and use of data often raises concerns about privacy protection. The advent of privacy-preserving computing and blockchain technology provides us with a solution that balances data utilization and privacy protection.
Privacy-preserving computing and blockchain are two independent, but interdependent and mutually reinforcing concepts.
We understand that the starting point of privacy-preserving computing is to solve the problem that the privacy of the original data is not exposed in the process of multi-party interaction, and the starting point of blockchain is to pursue the problem of decentralized collaboration and autonomy.
In addition, from a technical point of view, in the process of privacy computing, the original data is strictly protected and cannot be viewed by unauthorized parties, whether through secure multi-party computation or homomorphic encryption. On the other hand, all data is open and transparent on the chain and can be viewed by everyone, and consensus is obtained through this method.
So it also shows that there is no relationship between blockchain and privacy-preserving computing.
But why are they interdependent and mutually reinforcing?
From a technical point of view, blockchain is a benchmark for technology integration innovation, which includes modern cryptography, data structures, consensus mechanisms and other relevant achievements of economics.
Privacy-preserving computing, on the other hand, is pure and simple, mainly building modern cryptography technology, and of course, some branches are based on hardware devices, such as trusted execution environments.
For example, hash verification, asymmetric encryption, etc., are all in the category of modern cryptography, in fact, this is also a very critical part of blockchain technology.
It can be said that without the development of modern cryptography, there would be no development of blockchain technology and privacy-preserving computing.
In this sense, the two of them come from the same source.
In addition, the main premise of blockchain to achieve decentralized consensus is the openness and transparency of blockchain data, so that everyone can verify, which is a means, not his goal.
The purpose of blockchain is to verify the trustworthiness of the data, not to see what the original data really is.
The purpose of privacy-preserving computing is to obtain the calculation results of data, rather than leaking the privacy of data.
From this point of view, the two are interrelated and mutually reinforcing.
So what does a trusted execution environment play in between?
A Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) is a secure container for hardware or software that provides a secure computing environment in which privacy computation and data protection can be performed. The trusted execution environment has the following characteristics: security isolation, encrypted computing, and verifiability.
In blockchains, a trusted execution environment can serve as a secure environment for executing smart contracts and performing privacy-preserving computations. By placing privacy-preserving computing and data protection operations in a trusted execution environment, data privacy can be protected and data security and privacy ensured. The Trusted Execution Environment can also provide higher computing efficiency and performance, facilitating the development and expansion of blockchain applications.