SaTC: CORE: Small: Efficient Trustless Distributed Cryptography

分布式密码学是指不同的各方或组织共同运行隐私或完整性协议的范式。突出的例子包括安全多方计算和分布式账本技术。分布式密码学的中心目标是避免任何集中的可信方或单点故障。然而，今天的许多协议和系统仍然需要保持一定程度的中央信任，通常以初始可信经销商或可信设置阶段的形式存在。这些核心的信任假设违背了分布式密码学的哲学。它们仍然普遍存在的原因是效率和方便。通常情况下，没有中央信任的解决方案比使用中央信任的解决方案更难构建，成本也更高。该项目旨在发明和推广没有中央信任的分布式加密协议，在简单性和效率方面将它们与受信任的对等物置于同等地位。该项目将研究一系列基础问题，包括可靠广播、拜占庭容错共识（分布式账本的底层技术）、可验证的信息分散、可验证的秘密共享和分布式随机信标。对于这些问题中的每一个，目标是设计新的解决方案，这些解决方案不依赖于任何中心信任，并且可以在渐近复杂性和实际性能方面与受信任的对应物的效率相匹配。该项目还将设计实用的分布式密钥生成和设置生成协议，以帮助从现有的分布式加密协议中消除中央信任。启发这个项目的一个关键洞见是，所有这些重要问题的基础是一个简单却被忽视的问题，即数据传播。该项目将系统地研究数据传播，并将其应用于分布式密码学的许多领域。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。

Distributed cryptography refers to the paradigm where different parties or organizations jointly run a protocol for privacy or integrity. Prominent examples include secure multi-party computation and distributed ledger technology. A central goal in distributed cryptography is to avoid any centralized trusted party or single point of failure. Many protocols and systems today, however, still need to keep some degree of central trust, often in the form of an initial trusted dealer or trusted setup phase. These central trust assumptions go against the philosophy of distributed cryptography. The reason why they are still common is efficiency and convenience. More often than not, solutions without central trust are harder to construct and more costly than ones using central trust. This project seeks to invent and promote distributed cryptographic protocols without central trust by placing them on equal footing with their trusted counterparts in terms of simplicity and efficiency. The project will study a series of fundamental problems including reliable broadcast, Byzantine fault tolerant consensus (the underlying technology of distributed ledgers), verifiable information dispersal, verifiable secret sharing, and distributed randomness beacons. For each of these problems, the goal is to design new solutions that do not rely on any central trust and can match the efficiency of their trusted counterparts, both in terms of asymptotic complexity and practical performance. The project will also design practical distributed key generation and setup generation protocols to help remove central trust from existing distributed cryptographic protocols. A crucial insight that inspired this project is that underlying all these important problems is a simple yet overlooked problem known as data dissemination. The project will systematically investigate data dissemination and apply it to many areas of distributed cryptography.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.