Smart contracts are applications that execute on blockchains. Today they manage billions of dollars in value and motivate visionary plans for pervasive blockchain deployment. While smart contracts inherit the availability and other security assurances of blockchains, however, they are impeded by blockchains' lack of confidentiality and poor performance.We present Ekiden, a system that addresses these critical gaps by combining blockchains with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). Ekiden leverages a novel architecture that separates consensus from execution, enabling efficient TEE-backed confidentiality-preserving smart contracts and high scalability. Our prototype (with Tendermint as the consensus layer) achieves example performance of 600x more throughput and 400x less latency at 1000x less cost than the Ethereum mainnet.Another contribution of this paper is that we systematically identify and treat the pitfalls arising from harmonizing TEEs and blockchains. Treated separately, both TEEs and blockchains provide powerful guarantees, but hybridized, though, they engender new attacks. For example, in naïve designs, privacy in TEE-backed contracts can be jeopardized by forgery of blocks, a seemingly unrelated attack vector. We believe the insights learned from Ekiden will prove to be of broad importance in hybridized TEE-blockchain systems.

Differential privacy promises to enable general data analytics while protecting individual privacy, but existing differential privacy mechanisms do not support the wide variety of features and databases used in real-world SQL-based analytics systems.This paper presents the first practical approach for differential privacy of SQL queries. Using 8.1 million real-world queries, we conduct an empirical study to determine the requirements for practical differential privacy, and discuss limitations of previous approaches in light of these requirements. To meet these requirements we propose elastic sensitivity, a novel method for approximating the local sensitivity of queries with general equijoins. We prove that elastic sensitivity is an upper bound on local sensitivity and can therefore be used to enforce differential privacy using any local sensitivity-based mechanism.We build FLEX, a practical end-to-end system to enforce differential privacy for SQL queries using elastic sensitivity. We demonstrate that FLEX is compatible with any existing database, can enforce differential privacy for real-world SQL queries, and incurs negligible (0.03%) performance overhead.

An empirically observed correlation between ion mobility cross sections in helium and nitrogen buffer gases was examined as a function of temperature, molecular size, and shape. Experimental cross sections were determined for tetraglycine, bradykinin, angiotensin 2, melittin, and ubiquitin at 300 K and in the range from 80 to 550 K on home-built instruments and calculated by the projection superposition approximation (PSA) method. The PSA was also used to predict cross sections for larger systems such as human pancreatic alpha-amylase, concanavalin, Pichia pastoris lysyl oxidase, and Klebsiella pneumoniae acetolactate synthase. The data show that the ratio of cross sections in helium and nitrogen depends significantly on the temperature of the buffer gas as well as the size and shape of the analyte ion. Therefore, the analysis of the data indicates that a simple formula that seeks to quantitatively relate the momentum transfer cross sections observed in two distinct buffer gases lacks a sound physical basis.

The thermal atomic layer etching (ALE) of WO and W was demonstrated with new "conversion-fluorination" and "oxidation-conversion-fluorination" etching mechanisms. Both of these mechanisms are based on sequential, self-limiting reactions. WO ALE was achieved by a "conversion-fluorination" mechanism using an AB exposure sequence with boron trichloride (BCl) and hydrogen fluoride (HF). BCl converts the WO surface to a BO layer while forming volatile WOCl products. Subsequently, HF spontaneously etches the BO layer producing volatile BF and HO products. In situ spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE) studies determined that the BCl and HF reactions were self-limiting versus exposure. The WO ALE etch rates increased with temperature from 0.55 Å/cycle at 128 °C to 4.19 Å/cycle at 207 °C. W served as an etch stop because BCl and HF could not etch the underlying W film. W ALE was performed using a three-step "oxidation-conversion-fluorination" mechanism. In this ABC exposure sequence, the W surface is first oxidized to a WO layer using O/O. Subsequently, the WO layer is etched with BCl and HF. SE could simultaneously monitor the W and WO thicknesses and conversion of W to WO. SE measurements showed that the W film thickness decreased linearly with number of ABC reaction cycles. W ALE was shown to be self-limiting with respect to each reaction in the ABC process. The etch rate for W ALE was ∼2.5 Å/cycle at 207 °C. An oxide thickness of ∼20 Å remained after W ALE, but could be removed by sequential BCl and HF exposures without affecting the W layer. These new etching mechanisms will enable the thermal ALE of a variety of additional metal materials including those that have volatile metal fluorides.