Cloud Computing Security

Several trends are contributing to a growing desire to ``outsource'' computing from a (relatively) weak computational device to a more powerful computation service. Consider cloud computing, where businesses buy computing time from a service, rather than purchase, provision, and maintain their own computing resources. Sometimes the applications outsourced to the cloud are so critical that it is imperative to rule out accidental errors during the computation, let alone malicious behavior from the cloud service provider. 

The proliferation of mobile devices, such as smart phones and netbooks, provides yet another venue in which a computationally weak device would like to be able to outsource a computation, e.g., a cryptographic operation or a photo manipulation, to a third-party and yet obtain a strong assurance that the result returned is correct.

In all of these scenarios, a key requirement is that the amount of work performed by the client to generate and verify work instances must be substantially cheaper than performing the computation on its own. It is also desirable to keep the work performed by the workers as close as possible to the amount of work needed to compute the original function. Otherwise, the worker may be unable to complete the task in a reasonable amount of time, or the cost to the client may become prohibitive.

Group members are actively researching methods for efficient verifiable computation, i.e. schemes that allow a client to efficiently verify the result of an outsourced computation, by investing much less work than required by the computation itself.

Affiliated Publications

D. Fiore and R.Gennaro. Improved Publicly Verifiable Delegation of Large Polynomials and Matrix Computations. ACM CCS 2012

S.Benabbas, R.Gennaro and Y.Vahlis. Verifiable Delegation of Computation over Large Datasets, CRYPTO 2011.

R.Gennaro, C.Gentry, B.Parno. Non-Interactive Verifiable Computing: Outsourcing Computation to Untrusted Workers, CRYPTO 2010.

Dario Catalano, Dario Fiore, Rosario Gennaro, Luca Nizzardo. Generalizing Homomorphic MACs for Arithmetic Circuits. Public Key Cryptography 2014: LNCS 8383, pp.538-555.

Rosario Gennaro, Daniel Wichs. Fully Homomorphic Message Authenticators. ASIACRYPT 2013: LNCS 8270, pp.301-320.

Rosario Gennaro, Craig Gentry, Bryan Parno, Mariana Raykova. Quadratic Span Programs and Succinct NIZKs without PCPs. EUROCRYPT 2013: LNCS 7881, pp. 626-645.

Dario Catalano, Dario Fiore, Rosario Gennaro, Konstantinos Vamvourellis. Algebraic (Trapdoor) One-Way Functions and Their Applications. 2013 Theory of Cryptography Conference: LNCS 7785, pp.680-699.

Joël Alwen, Manuel Barbosa, Pooya Farshim, Rosario Gennaro, S. Dov Gordon, Stefano Tessaro, David A. Wilson. On the Relationship between Functional Encryption, Obfuscation, and Fully Homomorphic Encryption. 2013 IMA Int. Conf. on Cryptography and Coding: LNCS 8308, pp.65-84.

This research is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant SaTC #1017660 and by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.K. Ministry of Defence and was accomplished under Agreement Number W911NF-06-3-0001. 

Last Updated: 07/29/2015 13:53