Zero Knowledge Verifiable Key Management and TEEs with Turnkey
Oct 1, 2025
Arnaud Brousseau and Jack Kearney, co-founders of Turnkey, bring their extensive experience from Coinbase to discuss innovative key management solutions. They dive into the role of trusted execution environments (TEEs) in preventing key misuse while enhancing automation. Key topics include remote attestation, the importance of reproducible builds for trust, and strategies against downgrade attacks. The duo also explores how granular policies can secure transactions while allowing flexibility for governance and AI applications.
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COVID Lockdowns Sparked Turnkey's Start
- Jack left Polychain and started Turnkey in early 2022 after facing manual asset operations during COVID.
- The inability to access cold storage during lockdown motivated building a safer, automatable key manager.
Protect Keys And Control Their Use
- Turnkey treats authorization and policy as equally critical to key storage; TEEs protect keys but not misuse.
- They embed policy and authorization inside enclaves to prevent blind-signing risks.
Make Builds Reproducible And Attestable
- Build reproducible builds so anyone can compile source and verify deployed TEEs.
- Use reproducibility plus remote attestation to make TEEs auditable end-to-end.