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

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是通过研究和开发来实现可验证和机密的计算，从而提高底层加密计算的性能和成本。数字服务在通信、教育、银行等各个领域发挥着基础作用。如果没有加密技术，这些服务就不可能以安全和私密的方式在线进行。然而，许多新的和更强大的加密技术由于其计算昂贵的性质而仍然遥不可及。降低这些操作的成本不仅可以实现安全通信，还可以实现可验证和机密的计算，企业和政府部门对保护隐私的机器学习等用例的兴趣正在迅速增长。可验证和机密计算解决方案的市场预计将在未来五年内增长到超过10亿美元。该SBIR第二期项目建议设计和开发一个高性能的基于云的可验证和机密计算系统。目前，许多可验证和机密计算技术由于计算成本高而无法投入生产。该项目执行算法研究、硬件设计和软件开发，这将提高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，优化了这些算法的软件实现，以针对GPU架构，设计了减少需要传输的数据量的方法，并开发了一个横向扩展架构，该架构可以随着使用复杂性和用户数量的增长而动态扩展容量。通过适当的设计，该项目期望开发一个比现有设计具有超过一个数量级或更高性能的系统。此外，通过创建“基于云的”基础设施，这些资源可以以低延迟和低成本提供给世界各地的开发人员。预期的性能、成本和访问方面的改进将使以前不切实际的新用例成为可能。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.