How AI will help code tomorrow’s machines

Fabric Private Chaincode

Overview

Hyperledger Fabric Private Chaincode (FPC) enables the execution of chaincodes using Confidential Computing for Hyperledger Fabric.

The integrity of blockchain applications is ensured by the transparency and resilience gained from blockchain protocols. However, it also contradicts the goal of keeping the application state confidential and maintaining privacy for its users.

To remedy this problem, FPC uses Confidential Computing technology, in particular Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), to protect the privacy of chaincode data and computation from potentially untrusted peers.

Fabric Private Chaincode

Intel SGX is one of the most prominent Confidential Computing technologies today and available with commodity CPUs. It establishes trusted execution contexts, called enclaves, on a CPU. The enclaves isolate data and programs from the host operating system in hardware and ensure that outputs are correct.

This project provides a framework for developing and executing Fabric chaincode within an enclave. It allows to write chaincode applications where the data is encrypted on the ledger and can only be accessed in clear by authorized parties.

Fabric Private Chaincode is actively developed by researchers from IBM Research and Intel Labs in collaboration with the Hyperledger community. More information can be found on the Github project page.