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

安全的分布式系统在几个行业的数字化和增加信息共享方面显示出巨大的前景。例如，金融行业现在正在试验区块链和智能合同协议，以提高效率并打击数字资产市场中的欺诈行为。然而，最先进的系统需要越来越复杂的设计来满足性能和安全要求。例如，它们结合了并行或分区体系结构以获得更好的性能，以及零知识证明等加密技术来降低隐私风险。此外，一些最成功的分布式系统是可以由编写定制的“智能合同”程序的非专业应用程序开发人员扩展的平台。所有这些都使定义安全性的任务变得复杂，更不用说证明它了，因此大多数分布式系统仍然部署在根本没有任何严格的安全模型的情况下。该项目将通过设计新的编程语言抽象来定义和分析分布式协议的安全性，从而解决上述挑战。本项目沿着两个研究方向组织。第一个目标是将编程语言设计领域与密码学中广泛使用的通用可组合性(UC)理论联系起来。UC是一种流行的标准，因为它的模块化和强大的保证，并被广泛用于区块链协议的纸面分析；将其集成到编程框架中将使应用程序开发人员从这种模块化设计方法中受益。第二个研究重点是探索一种新的分布式系统体系结构，称为“健壮的分片MPC”，旨在提供比现有设计更好的可扩展性和安全性。将健壮的多方计算(MPC)与零知识证明(ZKP)相结合，将能够克服目前最先进的ZKP单独使用的表达限制。通过将分布式系统和应用密码学联系起来，该方法在使用健壮的分片MPC来克服仅基于零知识证明的最新技术的局限性方面是独一无二的。该项目将发布开源软件，帮助验证目前已部署或正在开发的区块链协议的安全性，并支持课程和课程。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.