iExec, a company developing confidential computing infrastructure for Web3, has integrated dstack to enhance the security of its Nox protocol for on-chain finance. dstack is developed by Phala Network and provides trusted execution environment (TEE) technology, enabling applications to prove they are running in a secure and verified environment.
Nox is designed for DeFi and RWA applications that need to process sensitive financial information without exposing it on a public blockchain. Instead of working with plain data, smart contracts use encrypted handles, while confidential calculations take place off-chain inside protected execution environments.
To support this model, iExec deploys the Nox runner together with dstack’s quote service inside a confidential virtual machine. During startup, dstack measures the environment and generates hardware-backed attestation data based on Intel TDX. This evidence allows the protocol to verify that the expected software is running before confidential data, cryptographic keys, or computation results are trusted.
The attestation process can also be linked to a specific request by including information such as a deployment ID, workload version, or transaction hash. After successful verification, Nox performs confidential calculations, temporarily decrypts data only in memory, encrypts the results again, and returns encrypted outputs to the blockchain.
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