Submission #17: Confidential Consortium Framework
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Authors
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1. Alex Shamis <alexsha@microsoft.com> (Microsoft Research)
2. Amaury Chamayou <amchamay@microsoft.com> (Microsoft Research)
3. Cedric Fournet <fournet@microsoft.com> (Microsoft Research)
4. Christoph M Wintersteiger <cwinter@microsoft.com> (Microsoft Research)
5. Eddy Ashton <edashton@microsoft.com> (Microsoft Research)
6. Julien Maffre <jumaffre@microsoft.com> (Microsoft Research)
7. Manuel Costa <manuelc@microsoft.com> (Microsoft Research)
8. Miguel Castro <mcastro@microsoft.com> (Microsoft Research)
9. Olga Vrousgou <olvrousg@microsoft.com> (Microsoft Research)
10. Sylvan Clebsch <syclebsc@microsoft.com> (Microsoft Research)

Abstract
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The Confidential Consortium Framework (CCF) is an open-source framework for building permissioned confidential applications.
CCF uses replicated hardware-protected trusted execution environments to provide confidentiality and integrity.
Trusted nodes maintain a distributed ledger using a crash fault-tolerant consensus protocol with offline verifiability.
CCF exposes a transactional programming model based on a key-value store and access control to sensitive data is enforced at the application level.
CCF also supports transparent, programmable governance where the power of the members of the consortium is tunable and their actions recorded in the ledger for full auditability.

The implementation of CCF is based on SGX-enabled Azure Confidential Compute and is built on top of the Open Enclave SDK.
Experimental results show that CCF achieves throughput of ~50,000 transactions per second and latency of ~250 milliseconds for a geo-replicated Simple Bank application.
CCF code and documentation are available at https://github.com/Microsoft/CCF.