TEE vs MPC: which trust assumption are you willing to live with
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Frames TEE vs MPC as a trust-assumption choice. TEEs offer speed but depend on enclave isolation, attestation and patching, while MPC removes hardware risk at the cost of coordination, liveness and higher per-operation cost.
TEE vs MPC often gets framed as “speed vs security,” but the more useful question is: what trust assumption are you willing to live with?
TEEs (like Intel SGX-style enclaves) usually win on developer ergonomics and latency.
The trust assumption is very specific: the enclave isolation works, the attestation system is sound, and vulnerabilities get patched fast enough.
If any of those break, confidentiality can degrade in ways that are hard to detect from the outside.
MPC shifts trust away from any single machine.
The model becomes: a threshold of parties behaves honestly (or at least doesn’t collude), protocols are implemented correctly, and the network coordination is reliable.
You don’t inherit “hardware supply chain risk,” but you do inherit operational overhead: key ceremonies, liveness assumptions, and higher costs per operation.
Example: @OasisProtocol leaning into TEEs for confidential execution, meaning the design choice is clearly “get confidentiality with speed,” while accepting a hardware-attached trust model and building mitigations around it.
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