Mental models for real-world cryptography and trusted execution environments

What are Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), and should we trust them? Do we still need to trust hardware if we already trust cryptography?

In this talk, Ittai Abraham (Intel Labs) shares key learnings and mental models that help reason about the use of cryptography and TEEs. He explores how TEEs can transform many aspects of web3 architecture — including data availability, block production, consensus, execution, and layer-2 scaling — as well as emerging “layer-3” use cases such as confidential inference and secure agentic operations.

He covers two complementary paradigms: TEEs as primary security anchors, and TEEs as defense-in-depth components. The talk highlights practical trade-offs, limitations, and exciting opportunities for future systems that combine TEEs with decentralization and cryptography.

About the presenter
Ittai is a technologist and computer scientist with broad interests in algorithms, security, and distributed computing. His work bridges theory and practice, spanning cryptography, blockchain systems, and critical distributed infrastructure. He is currently a Senior Principal Engineer at Intel Labs and previously held industrial research roles at VMware and Microsoft Research.

About a16z crypto research
a16z crypto research is a multidisciplinary lab that works closely with our portfolio companies and others toward solving the important problems in the space, and toward advancing the science and technology of the next generation of the internet.

More about us: a16z.com/2022/04/21/announcing-a16z-crypto-research

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