Research Basis
Privana's architecture is grounded in peer-reviewed cryptographic research published by Cornell Tech.
Primary Research Paper
"Liquefaction: Privately Liquefying Blockchain Assets"
Austgen, Fábrega, Kelkar, Vilardell, Allen, Babel, Yu, and Juels — Cornell Tech
arXiv: 2412.02634, December 2024
This paper introduces key encumbrance as a primitive, formalizes the SEAO assumption that conventional wallets rely on, and proves security properties of TEE-based policy governance. The paper demonstrates that TEE-based key encumbrance can break the Single-Entity Address-Ownership assumption, enabling private renting, sharing, and pooling of blockchain assets and privileges. Privana is Oasis's implementation of the Liquefaction framework.
Key concepts from the research
Key Encumbrance
The core primitive. A private key generated and held within a TEE, governed by programmable access-control policies. Enables automation without custody transfer.
SEAO Assumption
Single-Entity Address-Ownership: the assumption that one blockchain address is controlled by a single entity. Key encumbrance breaks this in a controlled, beneficial way.
Asset-Time Segmentation
The principle that a given asset is exclusively controlled by one sub-policy at any given time. Prevents deadlock and double-spend between competing policies.
Overlay Smart Contracts
Because encumbered keys are managed off-chain (in TEEs), smart-contract-like logic can be applied to chains that have no native smart contract support: Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Litecoin, etc.
Additional references
Several additional works inform the security model: Kelkar et al. on Complete Knowledge proofs (ACM CCS, 2024), Jean-Louis et al. on privacy flaws in TEE-based platforms (ePrint 2023/378), and Van Schaik et al. on SGX security (IEEE S&P, 2024). For readers interested in the full security analysis, the Liquefaction paper is the recommended starting point.
For Oasis-specific technical resources: Sapphire developer documentation, ROFL documentation, and the Oasis Protocol overview.