TEEBFT: Pricing the Security of Data Center Execution Assurance
Alex Shamis, Matt Stephenson, Linfeng Zhou
Technical Report, 2025
Blockchains face inherent limitations when communicating outside their own ecosystem, largely due to the Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) 3f+1 security model. Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are a promising mitigation because they allow a single trusted broker to interface securely with external systems. This paper develops a cost-of-collusion principal-agent model for compromising a TEE in a Data Center Execution Assurance design. The model isolates the main drivers of attack profitability: a K-of-n coordination threshold, independent detection risk q, heterogeneous per-member sanctions F_i, and a short-window flow prize (omega) proportional to the value secured (beta times V). We derive closed-form deterrence thresholds and a conservative design bound (V_safe) that make collusion unprofitable under transparent parameter choices. Calibrations based on time-advantaged arbitrage indicate that plausible TEE parameters can protect on the order of one trillion dollars in value. The analysis informs the design of TEE-BFT, a blockchain architecture that combines BFT consensus with near-stateless TEEs, distributed key generation, and on-chain attestation to maintain security when interacting with external systems.
