CAREER: Composable Programming Abstractions for Secure Distributed Computing and Blockchain Applications

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Secure distributed systems are showing great promise for digitizing and increasing information sharing in several industries. For example, the financial industry is now experimenting with blockchains and smart contract protocols to improve efficiency and combat fraud in digital asset markets. However, state-of-the-art systems require increasingly complex designs to meet performance and security requirements. For example, they incorporate parallel or partitioned architectures for better performance, as well as cryptographic techniques like zero knowledge proofs to mitigate privacy risks. Furthermore, some of the most successful distributed systems are platforms that can be extended by non-expert application developers writing customized “smart contract” programs. All of these complicate the task of defining security, let alone proving it, and as a result most distributed systems are still deployed without any rigorous security model at all. This project will address the above challenges by designing new programming language abstractions for defining and analyzing the security of distributed protocols. This project is organized along two research directions. The first goal is to bridge the field of programming language design and the widely-used Universal Composability (UC) theory from cryptography. UC a popular standard because of its modularity and strong guarantees, and is widely used for on-paper analysis of blockchain protocols; integrating this into a programming framework will enable application developers to benefit from this modular design approach. The second research thrust aims to explore a new distributed system architecture, called “robust sharded MPC," aimed at providing better scalability and security than existing designs. Combining robust multiparty computation (MPC) together with zero knowledge proofs (ZKP) will be able to overcome the expressiveness limitations of the current state-of-the-art, where ZKP is used alone. By bridging distributed systems and applied cryptography, the approach is unique in using robust sharded MPC to overcome limitations of the state-of-the-art based on zero knowledge proofs alone. The project will release open source software and to help validate the security of blockchain protocols deployed or in development today, and to support courses and curriculum.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.