I once found an old USB drive with a backup I thought I had lost. The files opened just fine, but for a few seconds I genuinely couldn't remember which project they belonged to. Nothing inside the files had changed. The problem was that I had lost the context around them.
That was oddly similar to what I kept thinking about while reading Newton Protocol's SecureEnvelope.
The flow itself isn't complicated. The client encrypts the policy data first, builds a SecureEnvelope, includes Additional Authenticated Data with the destination contract address and chain ID, then sends the envelope to Newton's operators. The operators evaluate the policy, return an attestation, and later the destination contract verifies both the attestation and whether the envelope still matches the contract and chain it was created for.
I almost dismissed the AAD part because it sounded like implementation detail. Maybe that was my mistake.
The ciphertext was already encrypted before it reached the operators. So SecureEnvelope doesn't seem to be solving "how do we hide the data?" It feels more like it's asking whether the same encrypted payload should still be considered valid after someone quietly changes the environment around it.
I don't know if I would have thought about that problem on my own. I usually associate encryption with confidentiality, not with preserving context. Maybe those are two separate security questions. Or maybe I've been treating them as separate for too long when systems like Newton are really trying to tie them back together.
#newt $NEWT @NewtonProtocol
That was oddly similar to what I kept thinking about while reading Newton Protocol's SecureEnvelope.
The flow itself isn't complicated. The client encrypts the policy data first, builds a SecureEnvelope, includes Additional Authenticated Data with the destination contract address and chain ID, then sends the envelope to Newton's operators. The operators evaluate the policy, return an attestation, and later the destination contract verifies both the attestation and whether the envelope still matches the contract and chain it was created for.
I almost dismissed the AAD part because it sounded like implementation detail. Maybe that was my mistake.
The ciphertext was already encrypted before it reached the operators. So SecureEnvelope doesn't seem to be solving "how do we hide the data?" It feels more like it's asking whether the same encrypted payload should still be considered valid after someone quietly changes the environment around it.
I don't know if I would have thought about that problem on my own. I usually associate encryption with confidentiality, not with preserving context. Maybe those are two separate security questions. Or maybe I've been treating them as separate for too long when systems like Newton are really trying to tie them back together.
#newt $NEWT @NewtonProtocol