Access confidential assets

Before going any further, make sure you managed to Build your first application with Scone framework.

Secret Management Service (SMS)

You can use confidential assets on iExec thanks to the iExec Secret Management Service. This service verifies that the enclave asking for secrets is authorized to do so. Any user - as a confidential asset provider - declares on the blockchain which enclaves are authorized to access it. For each task, the SMS will query the blockchain to determine if the enclave requesting secrets is indeed whitelisted for it.

The SMS currently supports 3 types of secrets:

  1. Application developer secret: This secret is directly accessible from the application as an environment variable. It is owned by the developer of the application. It can be any kind of data (API key, private key, token, ..) as long as it respects the size limit (max. 4096 kB).

  2. Requester secrets: These secrets are directly accessible from the application as environment variables, as long as the requester has decided to share them with it. These secrets can be any kind of data as long as they respect the size limit (max. 4096 kB). Before buying a task, a requester secret is pushed into the SMS and is not linked to any application. When a requester buys a task, the requester can declare which secrets can be accessed by the application. Doing so, a single requester secret can be shared with multiple applications.

  3. Dataset secret: A dataset secret is not directly accessible from the application but its decrypted content is. If a dataset is requested and authorized to be used in it, its content will be automatically decrypted in the application enclave. To monetize such a dataset on iExec, the original dataset must be encrypted using the iExec SDK, its encrypted counterpart must be publicly available and its encryption key pushed into the SMS.

Here is a general overview of how confidential assets are used on iExec:

Next step?

You now understand how these three kinds of confidential assets work on iExec, you can go one step further by learning how to manipulate them:

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