TEE is not a Healer: Rollback-Resistant Reliable Storage (2505.18648v1)

Abstract: Recent advances in secure hardware technologies, such as Intel SGX or ARM TrustZone, offer an opportunity to substantially reduce the costs of Byzantine fault-tolerance by placing the program code and state within a secure enclave known as a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). However, the protection offered by a TEE only applies during program execution. Once power is switched off, the non-volatile portion of the program state becomes vulnerable to rollback attacks wherein it is undetectably reverted to an older version. In this paper, we consider a problem of implementing reliable read/write registers out of failure-prone replicas subject to state rollbacks. To this end, we introduce a new unified model that captures the multiple failure types that can affect a TEE-based system. We then establish tight bounds on the fault-tolerance of register constructions in this model for both the static case, where failure thresholds hold throughout the entire execution, and the dynamic case, where they only hold eventually. Our dynamic register emulation algorithm resolves a long-standing question of how to correctly rebuild replica state upon restart without relying on additional hardware assumptions such as trusted monotonic counters.