A Cloud That Won’t Leak: A Look at Ethernity CLOUD

According to network equipment maker Cisco, 95% of internet traffic passes through cloud data centers. At the same time, 58% of cloud capacity belongs to giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Alibaba. 

Ethernity CLOUD considers monopolization dangerous: a failure in a major data center would render terabytes of user data inaccessible. The project team is developing a decentralized Confidential Computing ecosystem to address this problem.

We examine user data protection, uptime up to 100%, earnings from renting computing power, and other features of Ethernity CLOUD.

Objectives and Team

Ethernity CLOUD is a decentralized Confidential Computing ecosystem built on the Ethereum-compatible bloxberg blockchain bloxberg. The project’s objectives include:

• Improving the reliability of cloud computing. Centralized services store data in large data centers. If a server fails, all sites and applications hosted on it will become unavailable. Ethernity CLOUD duplicates data across nodes: the failure of one or more computers will not affect the cloud. 
• Resistance to censorship. Ethernity CLOUD has no single control center: governments cannot impose censorship or block access to resources.
• Ensuring user anonymity. Hosting with Ethernity CLOUD does not require providing personal data.
• Building a decentralized infrastructure. Пользователи смогут подключать компьютеры к Ethernity CLOUD и сдавать вычислительные мощности в аренду.

The development of Ethernity CLOUD is led by a team of engineers, developers, and business strategists under the leadership of Iosif Peterfi. From 2011 to 2018 he worked at the U.S. Department of Defense; in 2013 he founded the virtual private server (VPS) provider SchnellNode, and in 2017 — Ethernity CLOUD.

Ethernity CLOUD is a member of the Confidential Computing Consortium, which supports the development of ecosystems for secure data usage. The consortium also includes Alibaba, ARM, IBM, Intel, Google and Microsoft.

In late 2020 the Ethernity CLOUD testnet was launched. The launch of the mainnet and developer tools is planned for 2023.

Differences from Centralized Cloud Computing

Centralized cloud services carry out computations as follows:

1. The user sends encrypted data and instructions to the service.
2. The service allocates a portion of data-center capacity to run a virtual machine.
3. The service decrypts the user’s data and instructions, and then loads them into the virtual machine.
4. The virtual machine executes the user’s instructions and returns the result to the service.
5. The service encrypts the result and sends it back to the user.

The service protects data only during transmission to the user. They are exposed while the virtual machine is running: the service could read, steal, or tamper with them.

Centralized cloud services operate on trust. If a hacker or a Google Cloud employee steals user data, it leads to a scandal, loss of trust and profits. Providers spend on average $5,000 per year to protect each application. Despite this, in 2021 36% of organizations faced data theft in cloud computing.

At the heart of Ethernity CLOUD is a smart-contract system that provides users with proof of honest work. It works like this:

1. The user posts the instructions on the Ethernity CLOUD blockchain and sends the smart contract payment for task execution.
2. The smart contract locks the payment, reads the user’s instructions, and forms from available resources an enclave — a protected execution environment. The contract selects resource providers based on user ratings.
3. The enclave notifies the user that it is ready to perform the task.
4. The user sends encrypted data to the enclave.
5. The enclave decrypts the data and executes the task according to the instruction. The enclave’s owners cannot access the data in the protected environment.
6. The enclave sends the user the result and operation hashes.
7. The user receives the result, verification of correct execution, and a log of actions performed by the virtual machine. Then they confirm task completion and leave feedback for the resource providers.
8. The smart contract unlocks the payment and transfers it to the owners of the resources that were part of the enclave.

Read more about how the decentralized cloud works — in the Ethernity CLOUD technical white paper.

Decentralized Hosting and DNS

Centralized data centers promise uninterrupted server operation (uptime) at 99% of the time. But even the largest cloud services experience outages, for example Amazon and Google in 2021.

It might seem that the uptime of a decentralized service would be much lower: if the user’s router goes offline, data on their computer would be inaccessible to the cloud. Ethernity CLOUD solves this with constant replication of data across random nodes worldwide. As a result, uptime of the decentralized cloud can reach 100%.

To open a site in the cloud, a computer must know the server’s IP address and the network route to it. This data can be obtained via DNS (Domain Name System) — a database of domain names held by Internet service providers.

Ethernity CLOUD is developing a decentralized DNS that will store data on the bloxberg blockchain. This approach will protect users from censorship and hacking, including DNS cache poisoning.

Users will access the decentralized DNS using an open-source tool. Ethernity CLOUD will release it simultaneously with the decentralized DNS.

Ethernity CLOUD Economics

Ethernity CLOUD will operate on an Ethereum-compatible blockchain with a Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm. The project has an ERC-20 token ETNY. Users will pay for services in it, and network validators will receive rewards.

The Ethernity CLOUD team conducted a pre-sale of ETNY in June 2021. Investors bought 53 million tokens in 25 hours.

In Q3 2021 the Ethernity CLOUD ICO will take place. The project plans to sell 150 million ETNY — 15% of the total supply of 1 billion tokens. The starting price of ETNY is $0.0045.

A feature of decentralized networks is that users can provide services to one another for a reward. For example, owners of nodes in public blockchains earn rewards for validating transactions, creating blocks and securing the network.

Users of Ethernity CLOUD will be able to earn ETNY by renting out computing power. They will set prices themselves and, over time, form an open market for resources based on user ratings. The project team believes this approach will make decentralized cloud computing cheaper than centralized ones.

Conclusions

Centralized cloud services cannot guarantee the security of users’ data. Their customers must rely on the honesty of providers. Ethernity CLOUD addresses this problem with blockchain: it creates secure execution environments and provides users with proof of non-interference in data via smart contracts.

Users will be able to host sites and applications on Ethernity CLOUD: anonymously and without censorship. Renting resources from network participants will reduce hosting costs in the decentralized cloud. It is likely to be even lower than in centralized services.

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