iExec, a company developing confidential computing infrastructure for Web3, has integrated dstack to improve the security of its Nox protocol for on-chain finance. dstack is developed by Phala Network and provides Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) technology, allowing applications to prove that they are running in a secure and verified environment.
Nox is designed for DeFi and RWA applications that need to process sensitive financial information without exposing it on a public blockchain. Instead of working with simple data, smart contracts use encrypted identifiers, while confidential calculations take place off-chain in protected execution environments.
To support this model, iExec deploys the Nox runner with the dstack quote service in a confidential virtual machine. At startup, dstack measures the environment and generates hardware attestation data based on Intel TDX. These proofs allow the protocol to verify that the expected software is running before confidential data, cryptographic keys, or computational results can be trusted.
The attestation process can also be tied to a specific request by including information such as a deployment ID, workload version, or transaction hash. After successful verification, Nox performs confidential calculations, temporarily decrypts the data only in memory, re-encrypts the results, and returns the encrypted outputs to the blockchain.
Image: Magnificent
