SBIR Phase II: Hardware Acceleration for Zero Knowledge Proofs for Distributed Ledger Technology

SBIR 第二阶段：分布式账本技术零知识证明的硬件加速

• 批准号: 2112022
• 负责人: Simon Peffers
• 金额: $ 100万
• 依托单位: Supranational LLC
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Cooperative Agreement
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-09-15 至 2024-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2112022&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBIR; Phase; II; Hardware; Acceleration

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is the enablement of verifiable and confidential computing through research and development that improves the performance and cost of the underlying cryptographic computations. Digital services play a foundational role in varied sectors including communication, education, banking, and others. Without cryptography these services would be impossible to conduct online in a secure and private manner. However, many new and more powerful cryptographic techniques remain out of reach due to their computationally expensive nature. Reducing the cost of these operations enables not just secure communication, but also verifiable and confidential computation, of rapidly growing interest to both the enterprise and government segments for use cases such as privacy-preserving machine learning. The market for verifiable and confidential computing solutions is expected to grow to over one billion dollars in the next five years.This SBIR Phase II project proposes to design and develop a high performance cloud-based system for verifiable and confidential computing. Currently many verifiable and confidential computing techniques can not be brought into production due to their computationally expensive nature. This project performs algorithmic research, hardware design, and software development, that will improve the performance and cost of these operations. In particular, this project optimizes cryptographic algorithms to make them more amenable to GPU-based processing, optimize the software implementation of those algorithms to target GPU architectures, devise methods for reducing the amount of data that needs to be transmitted, and develop a scale-out architecture that dynamically scales capacity as the complexity of uses and number of users grow. With the appropriate design, the project expects to develop a system with over an order of magnitude or more performance than existing designs. Furthermore, by creating a ‘cloud-based’ infrastructure, these resources can be made available to developers around the world, with low latency and low cost. The expected improvements in performance, cost, and access will enable new use cases that have previously been impractical.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.

这项小型企业创新研究（SBIR）项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是通过研发来实现可验证和自信的计算，从而改善了基础加密计算的性能和成本。数字服务在各个部门中起着基本作用，包括沟通，教育，银行业等。没有密码学，这些服务将不可能以安全和私人的方式在线进行。但是，许多新的，更强大的加密技术仍然无法触及其计算昂贵的性质。降低这些操作的成本不仅可以使企业和政府领域的迅速增强的兴趣不仅可以确保安全沟通，而且还可以验证和机密计算，例如具有隐私机器学习的用例。预计在未来五年内，可验证和机密计算解决方案的市场预计将增长到十亿美元。这项SBIR II期项目建议设计和开发基于高性能的基于云的系统，以进行可验证和机密的计算。目前，由于其计算昂贵的性质，许多可验证和机密的计算技术无法投入生产。该项目执行算法研究，硬件设计和软件开发，可改善这些操作的性能和成本。特别是，该项目优化了加密算法，使其更适合基于GPU的处理，优化这些算法的软件实现以靶向GPU体系结构，设计了用于减少需要传输的数据量的方法，并开发出一个比例淘汰的体系结构，以使动态缩放能力扩展为复杂的用途和用户的使用数量。通过适当的设计，该项目期望与现有设计相比，具有超过数量级或更大的性能的系统。此外，通过创建一个“基于云”的基础架构，可以为世界各地的开发人员提供这些资源，其潜伏期低，成本较低。预期的绩效，成本和访问的提高将使以前是不切实际的新用例。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并使用基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛的影响审查标准，被视为通过评估来获得珍贵的支持。