hyperledger sawtooth lake -- Intel only or not?

Question

I understand that hyperledger sawtooth lake uses new secure CPU instructions to achieve Proof of elapsed time (PoET)

Does this mean that hyperledger sawtooth lake can only be used with Intel hardware? Can other chips be used?

Answer 1

There's some misstatements I need to correct here:

• Hyperledger Sawtooth has "pluggable consensus" allowing multiple consensus algorithms, including PoET. See https://sawtooth.hyperledger.org/docs/core/releases/latest/introduction.html?highlight=poet%20simulator#pluggable-consensus-algorithms
• The PoET Simulator is for non-Intel or non-SGX-hardware, including cloud environments.
• The PoET Simulator is secure, it is for production use. This is due to multiple layers of security and sanity checks.
• Edit: recently added to Sawtooth is the RAFT consensus algorithm. Consensus algorithm that elects a leader for a term of arbitrary time. Leader replaced if it times-out. Raft is faster than PoET, but is not Byzantine Fault Tolerant, BFT, (Raft is only Crash Fault Tolerant, CFT). Also Raft does not fork.

Answer 2

Short answer: No. Sawtooth is not Intel-only.

Hyperledger Sawtooth is a hardware neutral blockchain stack. It contains an optional SGX feature to harden consensus.

As of v0.8x Sawtooth contains 3 consensus options:

1. DevMode - used for development and testing
2. PoET (Simulated Enclave) - Provides limited Byzantine Fault Tolerance
3. PoET (SGX Enclave) - Enforces Byzantine Fault Tolerance using Intel SGX.

As Haim points out the PoET spec is written to be flexible to other or future Trusted Execution Environments.

Updated docs link: https://sawtooth.hyperledger.org/docs/core/releases/latest/