screenshot taken from: https://medium.com/flashbots/frontrunning-the-mev-crisis-40629a613752
When
Thursday, 12th March 2026, 2:00pm to 10:30pm
Where
Amplifier Berlin, Gustav-Meyer-Allee 25, Berlin, Germany
Hosting Organization
Edgeless Systems
Participation Fee
Free Entrance
Agenda
Talk 1, Talk 2, Talk 3 //only covering attended talks
Topics Covered
Ensuring Secure Execution of Confidential VMs in Cloud Data Centers (Talk 1), Trusted Execution Environments in Real-World Web3 Exchange Infrastructures (Talk 2), Security Considerations for Privacy-Preserving LLM Systems (Talk 3)
I’ve learned something today
- Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) is the profit someone can make by observing pending transactions in Ethereum’s mempool and manipulating transaction ordering. Bots watch the mempool in real time; when they see a transaction that will create profit (for example an arbitrage opportunity or a vulnerable contract call), they copy the transaction, modify it to send the profit to themselves, and submit it with a higher gas price so miners/validators include theirs first.
- The “Dark Forest” metaphor comes from the science-fiction novel The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin, where every civilization hides because revealing your position leads to instant destruction. Similarly, on Ethereum, revealing a profitable transaction in the mempool exposes it to automated predators (MEV bots) that will immediately attack the opportunity before the original transaction confirms.
- Confidential computing protects sensitive data during processing by running computations inside trusted execution environments that isolate code and data from the rest of the system. Its security relies on isolation, which prevents other processes from accessing the data, and attestation, which cryptographically proves that the environment is genuine and running the expected code.
- According to Understanding Trust Relationships in Cloud-Based Confidential Computing by Gianluca Scopelliti, Christoph Baumann, and Jan Tobias Mühlberg (2024), trust in confidential virtual machines can be structured into four Attestation Levels (AL) that progressively strengthen verification. These include AL1 (TEE hardware), AL2 (firmware), AL3 (kernel), and AL4 (operating system and applications), each verifying deeper layers of the stack and providing increasing assurance about the integrity of the execution environment.
- In confidential computing, trust means relying on an assumption that a provider or system will handle sensitive data securely, for example trusting a cloud provider’s infrastructure. Trustworthiness, in contrast, is established through verifiable evidence such as attestation and a hardware-rooted chain of trust, which proves that each layer of the system from hardware to software is running the expected and secure configuration.
- Workload substitution is an attack in which a malicious component replaces the intended code or workload with a different one during the boot or execution process. In confidential computing, this is a key concern because if any stage in the chain of trust fails to verify the integrity of the next component, an attacker could run unauthorized code instead of the trusted workload.
- The venue Amplifier Berlin is embedded in a landmark of industrial heritage:
picture taken at venue
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