Building blocks for robust, private, and decentralized computation

Yurek, Thomas James

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/121526 Copy

Description

Title

Building blocks for robust, private, and decentralized computation

Author(s)

Yurek, Thomas James

Issue Date

2023-07-14

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Miller, Andrew

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Miller, Andrew

Committee Member(s)

• Kate, Aniket
• Ren, Ling
• Borisov, Nikita
• Levchenko, Kirill

Department of Study

Computer Science

Discipline

Computer Science

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• multiparty computation
• secret sharing
• cryptography
• asynchronous

Abstract

The Internet has become increasingly centralized. While the early internet of the 90's and early 2000's could be described as an eclectic and often chaotic collection of decentralized niche communities, market forces have pushed the internet increasingly towards the centralization of information and the surveillance of internet users. In response, a new movement has emerged which seeks to create decentralized infrastructure which avoids the need for trusted authorities and respects user privacy. However, this is an incredibly daunting task: trustless decentralized services are inherently more difficult to build than trusted centralized ones, and moreover, many of the tools and techniques needed to make competitive decentralized infrastructure do not yet exist. This work aims to take a step towards remedying this issue and focuses primarily on tools to build multiparty computation: a privacy-respecting method of computing useful information from private user data. More specifically, we focus on the deployment of the first functional prototypes of decentralized protocols which simultaneously operate under the most restrictive network settings and tolerate as much active interference as possible.

Graduation Semester

2023-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2023 Thomas Yurek

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