Justin Holmgren: Securing Computation on Untrusted Platforms

Abstract:

In today's networked world, weak devices increasingly rely on remote servers both to store data and to perform costly computations.  Unfortunately, these servers may be easily hackable or otherwise untrustworthy.  Therefore, without assuming honest behavior on the server's part, we would like to guarantee two basic security objectives:

1. (Correctness) It is possible to verify the correctness of the server's computations much more efficiently than by re-executing the computation.

2. (Privacy) A server learns nothing about the computation it performs, other than (perhaps) the output.

I will present recent results that achieve both these goals for arbitrary computations, and I will conclude with a discussion of open problems and future directions.

Committee: Ran Canetti, Shafi Goldwasser and Vinod Vaikuntanathan