TWC: Medium: Apollo: An Architecture for Scalable Verifiable Computing

云计算使计算受限的各方能够将海量数据的存储和计算外包出去。然而，由于实现错误或恶意行为，此类外包计算可能无法正确执行。用于可验证计算的协议允许执行这种计算的不可信服务器还提供返回结果正确的简明证据。利用密码学、编程语言、数据库和系统的专业知识，该项目开发了一种新的架构(Apollo)，用于自动生成可伸缩的可验证计算协议。Apollo有可能将可验证计算的速度提高数量级，同时扩展到大型数据集。这项研究的重点是适合于不同环境中可验证计算的加密“小工具”，以及用于根据这些较低级别的小工具轻松表达可验证计算的编程语言和类型系统。该项目的一个主要目标是开发一个可验证的SQL数据库的工作原型。这项研究的结果将通过出版物和开源实施向广大受众传播，并将被整合到马里兰大学的云计算安全研究生课程中。

Cloud computing enables computationally limited parties to outsource the storage of, and computation on, massive amounts of data. Such outsourced computations, however, might be performed incorrectly, due to implementation errors or malicious behavior. Protocols for verifiable computation allow an untrusted server performing such computations to also provide succinct proofs that the returned results are correct. Drawing on expertise from cryptography, programming languages, databases, and systems, this project develops a novel architecture (Apollo) for automatically producing scalable verifiable-computation protocols. Apollo has the potential to speed up verifiable computations by orders of magnitude while at the same time scaling to large datasets.This research focuses on cryptographic "gadgets" suited for verifiable computation in different settings, as well as programming languages and type systems for easily expressing verifiable computation in terms of these lower-level gadgets. A major goal of the project is to develop a working prototype of a verifiable SQL database. Results of this research will be disseminated to a wide audience through publications and open-source implementations, and will be integrated into a graduate course on cloud computing security at the University of Maryland.