Golem’s guide to Trusted Computations: Part 0

A few weeks ago, Joanna Rutkowska and her team at Invisible Things Lab (ITL) published a guest post (including a demo) of their work on Graphene-ng, their proposed solution to solve the issues within enclave computations, most specifically Intel-SGX.

The first blogpost was aimed to give a very technical overview of this work, and both Joanna and the Golem team received great feedback. Yet we understand that the community needs to be introduced to these new findings in a more detailed and simplified manner, hence it is time for us to adapt the highly technical development and research behind it, and make it more accessible for our users.

Therefore, our tech team and communications team sat together and agreed to launch a series of blogposts to explain to our users how the computation layer is approached and developed in Golem, and cover all the related subjects to this core aspect of our project.

We would like to stress that the Graphene-ng technology may be of interest to other developers in both the crypto community and general developer scene, where strict security requirements must be met. So you can also expect updates regarding potential collaborations, integrations from outside of Golem and general use-cases.

What you will learn from this Blogpost series

First and foremost, this series is dedicated to trusted/verifiable computations in Golem, and the following blogposts will focus on that side of Golem, and general use-cases for this field.

The series will allow our community not only to gain a deeper understanding of Golem underpinnings but also shed more light on why the technology presented by Joanna is so promising in our setting.

We are constructing these educational blogposts with the goal of generating a new avenue for our community, in order to update you on where we are now regarding general SGX development and present a general description of short to mid-term goals related to this trusted computation layer in Golem. We consider it important to introduce the reasons why the technology presented by Joanna suits our needs, and give a clear and straightforward introduction to it and how it fits Golem, followed by an explanation on how exactly it mitigates/solves challenges/issues we face in our project.

For instance, in the first blogpost, we will present general, high-level Golem requirements and computational use-cases and show you where the challenges lie. Each challenge will be addressed shortly.

Our goal: a more informed and participative Golem community

This series is a higher-level introduction which will facilitate the communication regarding the trusted computations area of Golem. We will be updating regularly about this particular and crucial area; hence we would like to generate a wider engagement by providing a more accessible explanation to help your participation.

In addition, you will be able to get a better understanding of the progress of Golem integrations in all levels regarding to trusted computations: core protocol updates, provider side updates (security and UX), updates to additional Golem services (such as Concent) as well as other Use Cases (e.g., Blender integration being ran in a trusted computation setting — which already works in Golem).

We are committed to breaking the barrier between non-technical and highly-expert users by streamlining our most technical communications into comprehensive guides.

We sincerely hope you join us, follow the series, and participate with questions.

Join the #trustedcomputations channel in our chatroom to ask all the questions you may have when reading through the upcoming series.