Hyperledger Fabric Private Chaincode (FPC) enables the execution of chaincodes using Intel SGX for Hyperledger Fabric.

The transparency and resilience gained from blockchain protocols ensure the integrity of blockchain applications and yet contradicts the goal to keep application state confidential and to maintain privacy for its users.

To remedy this problem, this project uses Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), in particular Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), to protect the privacy of chaincode data and computation from potentially untrusted peers.

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

This lab provides a framework to develop and execute 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. Furthermore, Fabric extensions for chaincode enclave registration and transaction verification are provided.

This lab proposes an architecture to enable private chaincode execution using Intel SGX for Hyperledger Fabric as presented and published in the paper:

• Marcus Brandenburger, Christian Cachin, Rüdiger Kapitza, Alessandro Sorniotti: Blockchain and Trusted Computing: Problems, Pitfalls, and a Solution for Hyperledger Fabric. https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.08541

We provide an initial proof-of-concept implementation of the proposed architecture. Note that the code provided in this repository is prototype code and not meant for production use! The main goal of this lab is to discuss and refine the proposed architecture involving the Hyperledger community.

For up to date information about our community meeting schedule, past presentations, and info on how to contact us please refer to our wiki page.

This lab extends a Fabric peer with the following components: A chaincode enclave that executes a particular chaincode and a ledger enclave that enables all chaincode enclaves to verify the blockchain state integrity; all run inside SGX. In the untrusted part of the peer, an enclave registry maintains the identities of all chaincode enclaves and an enclave transaction validator that is responsible for validating transactions executed by a chaincode enclave before committing them to the ledger.

The following diagram shows the architecture:

The system consists of the following components:

1. Chaincode enclave: The chaincode enclave executes one particular chaincode, and thereby isolates it from the peer and from other chaincodes. A chaincode library acts as intermediary between the chaincode in the enclave and the peer. The chaincode enclave exposes the Fabric chaincode interface and extends it with additional support for state encryption, attestation, and secure blockchain state access. This component is devided into two subcomponents: ecc_enclave contains the code running inside an enclave and ecc contains a wrapper chaincode that invokes the enclave.

2. Ledger enclave: The ledger enclave maintains the ledger in an enclave in the form of integrity-specific metadata representing the most recent blockchain state at the peer. It performs the same validation steps as the peer when a new block arrives, but additionally generates a cryptographic hash of each key-value pair of the blockchain state and stores it within the enclave. The ledger enclave exposes an interface to the chaincode enclave for accessing the integrity-specific metadata. This is used to verify the correctness of the data retrieved from the blockchain state. Like the chaincode enclave, the ledger enclave is divided into two subcomponents: tlcc and tlcc_enclave.

3. Enclave registry: The enclave registry is a chaincode that runs outside SGX and maintains a list of all existing chaincode enclaves in the network. It performs attestation with the chaincode enclave and stores the attestation result on the blockchain. The attestation demonstrates that a specific chaincode executes in an actual enclave. This enables the peers and the clients to inspect the attestation of a chaincode enclave before invoking chaincode operations or committing state changes. The enclave registry (ercc) comes with a custom validation plugin (ercc-vscc).

4. Enclave transaction validator: The enclave transaction validator (ecc/vscc) complements the peer’s validation system and is responsible for validating transactions produced by a chaincode enclave. In particular, the enclave transaction validator checks that a transaction contains a valid signature issued by a registered chaincode enclave. If the validation is successful, it marks the transactions as valid and hands it over to the ledger enclave, which crosschecks the decision before it finally commits the transaction to the ledger.

• Concept Release - March 2, 2020

WARNING: This project is in continous development and the master branch will not always be stable. Unless you want to actively contribute to the project itself, we advice you to use one of above releases

The following steps guide you through the build phase and configuration, for deploying and running an example private chaincode.

We assume that you are familiar with building Fabric manually; otherwise we highly recommend to spend some time to build Fabric and run a simple network with a few peers and a ordering service. We recommend the Fabric documentation as your starting point. You should start with installing Fabric dependencies and setting up your development environment.

Moreover, we assume that you are familiar with the Intel SGX SDK.

To run Fabric Private Chaincode in secure mode, you need an SGX-enabled hardware as well corresponding OS support. However, even if you don't have SGX hardware available, you still can run FPC in simulation mode by setting SGX_MODE=SIM in your environment.

Note that the simulation mode is for developing purpose only and does not provide any security guarantees.

Notice: by default the project builds in hardware-mode SGX, SGX_MODE=HW as defined in <absolute-project-path>/fabric-private-chaincode/config.mk and you can explicitly opt for building in simulation-mode SGX, SGX_MODE=SIM. In order to set non-default values for install location, or for building in simulation-mode SGX, you can create the file <absolute-project-path>/fabric-private-chaincode/config.override.mk and override the default values by defining the corresponding environment variable.

If you run SGX in simulation mode only, you can skip below sections and jump right away to Setup your Development Environment.

Note that you can always come back here when you want a setup with SGX hardware-mode later after having tested with simulation mode.

Install the Intel SGX software stack for Linux (including the SGX driver and the SGX Platform Software (PSW)) by following the official documentation.

We currently support EPID-based attestation and use the Intel's Attestation Service to perform attestation with chaincode enclaves.

What you need:

• a Service Provider ID (SPID)
• the (primary) api-key associated with your SPID

In order to use Intel's Attestation Service (IAS), you need to register with Intel. On the IAS EPID registration page you can find more details on how to register and obtain your SPID plus corresponding api-key.

We currently support both linkable and unlinkable signatures for the attestation. The type of attestation used is selected based on the FPC_ATTESTATION_TYPE environment variable: epid_unlinkable for unlinkable or epid_linkable for linkable signatures. If you do not define that environment variable, the chosen attestation method is epid_unlinkable. Note that a mismatch between your IAS credentials and the linkable setting will result in an (HTTP) error '400' visible in the log-files when the code tries to verify the attestation. (Another cause for such error '400' could a mismatch between provided SPID and api key as specified below).

Place your ias api key and your SPID in the ias folder as follows:

echo 'YOUR_API_KEY' > ${GOPATH}/src/github.com/hyperledger-labs/fabric-private-chaincode/config/ias/api_key.txt
echo 'YOUR_SPID' > ${GOPATH}/src/github.com/hyperledger-labs/fabric-private-chaincode/config/ias/spid.txt

There are 2 different ways to develop Fabric Private Chaincode. Using our preconfigured Docker container development environment or setting up your local system with all required software dependencies to build and develop chaincode locally.

As standard Fabric, we require docker to run chaincode. We recommend to set privileges to manage docker as a non-root user. See the official docker documentation for more details.

We provide a docker image containing the FPC development environment. This will enable you to get a quick start to get FPC running.

First make sure your host has

• A running Docker daemon compatible with docker provided by Ubuntu 18.04, currently Docker version 18.09. It also should use /var/run/docker.sock as socket to interact with the daemon (or you will have to override in <absolute-project-path>/fabric-private-chaincode/config.override.mk the default definition in make of DOCKER_DAEMON_SOCKET)
• GNU make

A few notes:

• if you run behind a proxy, you will have to configure the proxy, e.g., for docker (~/.docker/config.json). See Working from behind a proxy below for more information.
• if your local host is SGX enabled, i.e., there is a device /dev/sgx or /dev/isgx and your PSW daemon listens to /var/run/aesmd, then the docker image will be sgx-enabled and your settings from ./config/ias will be used. You will have to manually set SGX_MODE=HW before building anything to use HW mode.
• if you want additional apt packages in your container image, add to the <absolute-project-path>/fabric-private-chaincode/config.override.mk file in the fabric-private-chaincode directory. In that file, define DOCKER_DEV_IMAGE_APT_ADD__PKGS with a list of packages you want. They will then be automatically added to the docker image
• due to the way the peer's port for chaincode connection is managed, you will be able to run only a single FPC development container on a particular host.

To build the docker image, run

$ cd utils/docker; make dev

and then use it with

$ cd utils/docker; make run

This will open a shell inside the FPC development container, with environment variables like GOPATH appropriately defined and all dependencies like fabric built, ready to build and run FPC.

Note that by default the dev container mounts your local cloned FPC project as a volume to /project/src/github.com/hyperledger-labs/fabric-private-chaincode within the docker container. This allows you to edit the content of the repository using your favorite editor in your system and the changes inside the docker container. Additionally, you are also not loosing changes inside the container when you reboot or the container gets stopped for other reasons.

Optional: to do a clean build do the following within the container

<docker-root>:project/src/github.com/hyperledger-labs/fabric-private-chaincode# make clean
<docker-root>:project/src/github.com/hyperledger-labs/fabric-private-chaincode# make build

Now you are ready to start development. Go to the Develop Your First Private Chaincode section.

Make sure that you have the following required dependencies installed:

• Linux (OS) (we recommend Ubuntu 18.04, see list supported OS)

• CMake v3.5.1 or higher

• Go 1.11.x or higher

• Docker 18.x

• Protocol Buffers 3.x and Nanopb 0.3.9.2

• SGX SDK v2.6 for Linux

• Credentials for Intel Attestation Service, read here (for hardware-mode SGX)

• SSL for SGX SDK v2.4.1 (we recommend using OpenSSL 1.1.0j)

• Hyperledger Fabric v1.4.3

• Clang-format 6.x or higher

• PlantUML including Graphviz (for building documentation only)

Fabric Private Chaincode requires the Intel SGX SDK and SGX SSL to build the main components of our framework and to develop and build your first private chaincode.

Install the Intel SGX software stack for Linux by following the official documentation. Please make sure that you use the SDK version as denoted above in the list of requirements.

For SGX SSL, just follow the instructions on the corresponding github page. In case you are building for simulation mode only and do not have HW support, you might also want to make sure that simulation mode is set when building and installing it.

Once you have installed the SGX SDK and SSL for SGX SDK please double check that SGX_SDK and SGX_SSL variables are set correctly in your environment.

We use nanopb, a lightweight implementation of Protocol Buffers, inside the ledger enclave to parse blocks of transactions. Install nanopb by following the instruction below. For this you need a working Google Protocol Buffers compiler with python bindings (e.g. via apt-get install protobuf-compiler python-protobuf libprotobuf-dev). For more detailed information consult the official nanopb documentation http://github.com/nanopb/nanopb.

$ export NANOPB_PATH=/path-to/install/nanopb/
$ git clone https://github.com/nanopb/nanopb.git ${NANOPB_PATH}
$ cd ${NANOPB_PATH}
$ git checkout nanopb-0.3.9.2
$ cd generator/proto && make

Make sure that you set $NANOPB_PATH as it is needed to build Fabric Private Chaincode.

Clone the code and make sure it is on your $GOPATH. (Important: we assume in this documentation and default configuration that your $GOPATH has a single root-directoy!)

$ git clone https://github.com/hyperledger-labs/fabric-private-chaincode.git $GOPATH/src/github.com/hyperledger-labs/fabric-private-chaincode

Next we need to patch the Fabric peer and rebuild it in order to enable Fabric Private Chaincode support.

Checkout Fabric 1.4.3 release and apply our patch using the following commands:

$ export FABRIC_PATH=${GOPATH}/src/github.com/hyperledger/fabric
$ git clone --branch v1.4.3 https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric.git $FABRIC_PATH
$ cd $FABRIC_PATH
$ git am ../../hyperledger-labs/fabric-private-chaincode/fabric/*.patch

Note that this patch does currently not work with the Fabric master branch, therefore make sure you use the Fabric v1.4.3 branch.

Once you have your development environment up and running (i.e., using our docker-based setup or install all all dependencies on your machine) you can build FPC and start developing your own FPC application.

Make sure Fabric is in your $GOPATH and you enable the plugin feature using GO_TAGS=pluginsenabled. Simply run

$ cd $FABRIC_PATH
$ GO_TAGS=pluginsenabled make

Building Fabric may take a while and it's time to get a coffee. Also, be not surprised if unit tests fail. In order to just build the peer you can run the following command:

$ GO_TAGS=pluginsenabled make peer

Please make sure that the peer is always built with GO_TAGS, otherwise our custom validation plugins will (silently!) be ignored by the peer, despite the settings in core.yaml.

Once you have setup your development environment including Intel SGX SDK and SSL, nanopb, and successfully patched and built Fabric you can build the Fabric Private Chaincode framework.

$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/hyperledger-labs/fabric-private-chaincode
$ make

This will build all required components and run the integration tests.

In utils/fabric-ccenv-sgx/ you can find instructions to create a custom fabric-ccenv docker image that is required to execute a chaincode within an enclave.

The chaincode enclave ecc_enclave and the ledger enclave tlcc_enclave can be built manually. Follow the instructions in the corresponding directories.

For the integration of the enclave code into a Fabric chaincode, please follow the instructions in ecc/ for the chaincode enclave and tlcc/ for the ledger enclave.

In order to run and deploy a chaincode enclave we need to build the enclave registry. See ercc/.

Moreover, we provide a set of integration tests in integration/ to demonstrate Fabric Private Chaincode capabilities.

Building the project requires docker. We do not recommend to run sudo make to resolve issues with mis-configured docker environments as this also changes your $GOPATH. Please see hints on docker installation above.

The makefiles do not ensure that docker files are always rebuild to match the latest version of the code in the repo. If you suspect you have an issue with outdated docker images, you can run make clobber build which forces a rebuild. It also ensures that all other downlad, build or test artifacts are scrubbed from your repo and might help overcoming other problems. Be advised that that the rebuild can take a fair amount of time.

The current code should work behind a proxy assuming

• you have defined the corresponding environment variables (i.e., http_proxy, https_proxy and, potentially, no_proxy) properly, and
• docker (daemon & client) is properly set up for proxies as outlined in the Docker documentation for clients and the daemon. If you run Ubuntu 18.04, make sure you run docker 18.09 or later. Otherwise you will run into problems with DNS resolution inside the container.

You will also require a recent version of docker-compose. In particular, the docker-compose from ubuntu 18.04 (docker-compose 1.17) is not recent enough to understand ~/.docker/config.json and related proxy options. To upgrade, install a recent version following the instructions from docker.com, e.g., for version 1.25.4 execute

 sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.25.4/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
 sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

Furthermore, for docker-compose networks to work properly with proxies, the noProxy variable in your ~/.docker/config.json should at least contain 127.0.0.1,127.0.1.1,localhost,.org1.example.com,.example.com.

Another problem you might encounter when running the integration tests insofar that some '0.0.0.0' in integration/config/core.yaml used by clients -- e.g., the peer CLI using the address: 0.0.0.0:7051 config as part of the peer section -- result in the client being unable to find the server. The likely error you will see is err: rpc error: code = Unavailable desc = transport is closing. In that case, you will have to replace the '0.0.0.0' with a concrete ip address such as '127.0.0.1'.

Our build system requires a few variables to be set in your environment. Missing variables may cause make to fail. Below you find a summary of all variables which you should carefully check and add to your environment.

# Path to your SGX SDK and SGX SSL
export SGX_SDK=/opt/intel/sgxsdk
export SGX_SSL=/opt/intel/sgxssl

# Path to nanopb
export NANOPB_PATH=$HOME/nanopb

# SGX simulation mode
export SGX_MODE=SIM

# SGX simulation mode
export SGX_MODE=HW

# The attestation type is ignored when SGX_MODE=SIM is set.

# IAS attestation (unlinkable)
export FPC_ATTESTATION_TYPE=epid_unlinkable

# IAS attestation (linkable)
export FPC_ATTESTATION_TYPE=epid_linkable

Some users may experience problems with clang-format. In particular, the error command not found: clang-format appears even after installing it via apt-get install clang-format. See here for how to fix this.

If, e.g., running the integration tests executed when you run make, you get errors of following form:

Error: endorsement failure during invoke. response: status:500 message:"Setup failed: Can not register enclave at ercc: Error while retrieving attestation report: IAS returned error: Code 401 Access Denied"

In case you run in SGX HW mode, check that your files in config/ias are set properly as explained in Section Intel Attestation Service (IAS). Note that if you run initially in simulation mode and these files do not exist, the build will create dummy files. In case you switch later to HW mode without configuring these files correctly for HW mode, this will result in above error.

Create, build and test your first private chaincode with this tutorial.

For an end-to-end application demonstrating the potential of FPC, check out our Clock Auction Demo Application.

To build documentation, you will have to install java and download plantuml.jar. Either put plantuml.jar into in your CLASSPATH environment variable or override PLANTUML_JAR or PLANTUML_CMD in config.override.mk (see config.mk for default definition of the two variables). Additionally, you will need the dot program from the graphviz package (e.g., via apt-get install graphviz on ubuntu).

By running the following command you can generate the documentation.

$ cd docs
$ make

Found a bug? Need help to fix an issue? You have a great idea for a new feature? Talk to us! You can reach us on RocketChat in #fabric-private-chaincode.

We also have a weekly meeting every Tuesday at 3 pm GMT on Zoom. Please see the Hyperledger community calendar for details.

For more information on how to contribute to Fabric Private Chaincode please see our contribution section.

• Marcus Brandenburger, Christian Cachin, Rüdiger Kapitza, Alessandro Sorniotti: Blockchain and Trusted Computing: Problems, Pitfalls, and a Solution for Hyperledger Fabric. https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.08541

• Data Privacy through Trusted Smart-contract Execution for Hyperledger Fabric. WIP Draft: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u15vjk4jZoeGHHE4abJ1TjY3XFFuCNpHBL6JCg73buo/edit?usp=sharing

• Presentation at the Hyperledger Fabric contributor meeting August 21, 2019. Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ewl7PcY9t27lScv2O2VaeHMsk13oe5B2MqU-qzDiR80

Hyperledger Fabric Private Chaincode operates as a Hyperledger Labs project. This code is provided solely to demonstrate basic Fabric Private Chaincode mechanisms and to facilitate collaboration to refine the project architecture and define minimum viable product requirements. The code provided in this repository is prototype code and not intended for production use.

• Marcus Brandenburger ([email protected])
• Christian Cachin ([email protected])
• Rüdiger Kapitza ([email protected])
• Alessandro Sorniotti ([email protected])

Gari Singh ([email protected])

Hyperledger Fabric Private Chaincode source code files are made available under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (Apache-2.0), located in the LICENSE file.