Achieving Greater Security and Efficiency Using AWS Nitro Enclaves and Anjuna Seaglass with Portal

San Francisco–headquartered Portal manages infrastructure to facilitate customer interactions with blockchains and to build applications on blockchains for embedded payments. To use tokens and move digital money around, each user needs a wallet. Portal offers secure, embedded wallets to facilitate digital asset transactions; its multiparty technology is central to these capabilities.

Using this technology, multiple parties can perform computations without revealing their individual inputs to each other. This helps maintain privacy and security in transactions that handle sensitive data. However, Portal’s process involves complex cryptographic operations to generate large prime numbers, which are used to create secure encryption keys. The time required to generate keys could vary, sometimes taking several seconds. Portal serves customers who have millions of users, all expecting near-instantaneous responses, so it needed to find a way to overcome this bottleneck.

After evaluating multiple solutions, Portal realized that using AWS Nitro Enclaves while working with Anjuna Security, who developed the Anjuna Seaglass software platform to simplify and accelerate the deployment of confidential computing environments, would deliver the optimal solution. “AWS Nitro Enclaves, along with Anjuna Seaglass, was the best solution to move fast, maintain our security constraints, and speed up our processes,” says Parsa Attari, cofounder of Portal.

Portal’s operations require large prime numbers, which are computationally intensive to generate. To speed up this process, the company originally considered pregenerating these numbers and fetching them during the operation. However, because of how security-sensitive these transactions can be, Portal did not want to use traditional methods for storing these pregenerated numbers, such as databases or file systems.

By using Anjuna Seaglass, Portal avoided the complexity of custom development. Instead, the company was able to run its applications without modifications, just like with regular compute instances. As a result, in only 2.5 weeks, Portal implemented AWS Nitro Enclaves to create compute environments for its most sensitive operations. This reduced time to market by an estimated 90 percent and removed the need for Portal to hire specialists.

“Anjuna Seaglass has been instrumental in simplifying our deployment,” says Attari. “With just one command, we can create secure enclaves for our applications, maintaining data confidentiality without the need for complex configurations.”

Using this capability, the company can store these numbers in memory inside the enclave, which provides built-in security protections and greatly reduces insider threat vectors. These enclaves are completely isolated from the host and have no persistent storage, no interactive access, and no networking, which means that even internal teams cannot access the sensitive data that they process. Within these secure environments, Portal can quickly access the pregenerated prime numbers, removing the time-consuming generation process during each transaction while maintaining security.

Portal also adopted AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), a service that is used to encrypt or digitally sign data, to manage encryption keys. Using AWS KMS, Portal can create and control the cryptographic keys that are used to encrypt data within the enclaves. This integration also provides a centralized, auditable system for key management, which helps Portal maintain compliance with various regulations. Portal also uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which is built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere, to securely store nonsensitive data and applications.

Portal worked with Anjuna Seaglass to adapt its existing application to a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline that is compatible with AWS Nitro Enclaves. “We use AWS KMS policies and key store alongside Amazon S3 to securely store AWS Nitro Enclaves information files for deployments,” says Domnick Eger, field chief technology officer and principal architect at Anjuna Security. “This approach aligns seamlessly with CI/CD processes; Portal has a standardized format to follow, so they do not have to start from scratch each time they deploy a new application.”

The solution also uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which is the most trusted way to start, run, and scale Kubernetes. Using Amazon EKS, Portal can scale its application based on demand so that it can efficiently handle fluctuations in user activity. Portal’s prime number generation and key creation processes are now distributed across multiple AWS Nitro Enclaves that are managed by Amazon EKS, helping Portal maintain high performance and strong security as its user base grows.

After implementing AWS Nitro Enclaves using Anjuna Seaglass, Portal accelerated key processing by 10 times, which has vastly improved the user experience. With isolated compute environments, Portal has also enhanced its security posture so that it can maintain compliance with the stringent security and auditability demands of the financial industry.

Portal also switched from manual deployments to automated, one-click processes, which has improved its operational efficiency. These gains, coupled with the automatic scaling capabilities of Amazon EKS, empower Portal to handle millions of daily transactions with robust performance.

Looking to the future, Portal is exploring new possibilities using AWS Nitro Enclaves, with a particular focus on peer-to-peer payments using blockchain. “It’s difficult for me to envision how we could accomplish certain tasks without AWS Nitro Enclaves,” says Attari. “While it might be possible to hire a team of exceptional engineers to build a system with the same level of security, it’s hard to see that as a realistic option. AWS Nitro Enclaves are truly unique in providing these capabilities.”