As an essential technology underpinning trusted computing, the trusted execution environment (TEE) allows one to launch computation tasks on both on- and off-premises data while assuring confidentiality and integrity. This article provides a systematic review and comparison of TEE-based secure computation protocols. We first propose a taxonomy that classifies secure computation protocols into three major categories, namely secure outsourced computation, secure distributed computation and secure multi-party computation. To enable a fair comparison of these protocols, we also present comprehensive assessment criteria with respect to four aspects: setting, methodology, security and performance. Based on these criteria, we review, discuss and compare the state-of-the-art TEE-based secure computation protocols for both general-purpose computation functions and special-purpose ones, such as privacy-preserving machine learning and encrypted database queries. To the best of our knowledge, this article is the first survey to review TEE-based secure computation protocols and the comprehensive comparison can serve as a guideline for selecting suitable protocols for deployment in practice. Finally, we also discuss several future research directions and challenges.
@article{arxiv.2302.12150,
title = {A Survey of Secure Computation Using Trusted Execution Environments},
author = {Xiaoguo Li and Bowen Zhao and Guomin Yang and Tao Xiang and Jian Weng and Robert H. Deng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.12150},
year = {2023}
}