Phala Network (PHA)

What is Phala Network

Phala Network is consisted of three components: phala-nodes which make up of Phala blockchain, pRuntime and phost. Among them, only pRuntime lives in TEE. Although attackers cannot peek into TEE, they can trick the contracts in TEE by forging transactions or replaying/reordering valid transactions. It it important to ensure that confidential contracts only accept valid transactions and process transactions in an expected order. That's why we introduce Phala blockchain and phost.

Phala blockchain serves as a canonical source of valid transactions. Only submitted transactions can be accepted by pRuntime, and they will be processed in the same order as on blockchain. We implement a light validaton client in pRuntime so it is able to determine whether valid transactions are accepted in expected order. Also a key rotation mechanism will be introduced to prevent the replay of historical transactions. The great thing is that pRuntime hides all these complicated implementation details from you so you can just implement confidential contracts like developing ordinary programs.

Phost works as the bridge between Phala blockchain and pRuntime. It ensures that all the transactions on blockchain are faithfully forwarded to pRuntime and all the TEE instances are running unmodified version of pRuntime.