CAREER: Securing Off-premise Digital Services in the Presence of Strategic Incentives

过去十年见证了云计算和去中心化计算的显著增长，数据和服务要么驻留在远程服务器上，要么分布在许多单独的设备上。这两种模式都提出了类似的安全问题：由于客户缺乏对服务流程的完全控制，他们需要确保服务提供商有正确的经济激励措施，以防止不当行为。由于网络安全的主要框架是由传统的内部计算驱动的，我们目前对网络安全的思考往往没有充分强调经济激励。因此，该项目正在进行跨学科研究，以分析存在激励问题的网络基础设施的良好运行。该项目旨在使基础设施更加多样化和强大；提高数字服务效率，提升经济竞争力；以科技促进数码服务提供的竞争；将前沿STEM话题带给更广泛的受众，包括经济学家、商业研究人员和公众；并开发教育材料，以弥合技术和商业学生之间的差距。为了从跨学科的角度丰富现有的网络安全分析范式，项目团队正在研究该主题下的几个具体主题，包括云客户端和提供商之间的委托代理摩擦，以及如何使用合约理论和密码学的最新进展来处理它，分散系统的长期可持续性，战略参与者之间的互动以及拜占庭式故障，以及利用前两个重点成果组织一个更高效、公平和包容的数字经济的潜力。在这些分析中，该项目还为商业/经济研究人员提供了最近的几项密码学突破。通过提高认识，项目团队旨在鼓励对与这些进步相关的经济和社会效益进行批判性评估，并提供一个新的视角来指导它们的进一步发展。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 past decade has witnessed significant growth in both cloud and decentralized computing, whereby data and services either live on remote servers or are distributed across many individual devices. Both models raise similar security concerns: As clients lack full control over the service process, they need to make sure that service providers have the right economic incentives to not misbehave. Since the predominant framework in cybersecurity has been motivated by traditional in-house computing, our current thinking about cybersecurity often does not adequately emphasize economic incentives. This project is thus conducting interdisciplinary research to analyze the well-functioning of cyberinfrastructure in the presence of incentive issues. The project aims to enable a more diversified and robust infrastructure; improve digital service efficiency for economic competitiveness; foster competition in digital services provision with technology; bring frontier STEM topics to a broader audience including economists, business researchers, and the general public; and develop education materials to bridge the gap between tech and business students. With the overall objective to enrich the existing paradigm for cybersecurity analysis from a cross-disciplinary perspective, the project team is studying several specific topics under the theme, including the principal-agent frictions between cloud clients and providers, and how to deal with it using both contract theory and recent advances in cryptography, the long-term sustainability of decentralized systems featuring interactions among strategic participants as well as Byzantine faults, and the potential of using results from the first two thrusts to organize a more efficient, fair, and inclusive digital economy. Within these analyses, the project is also illuminating several recent cryptographic breakthroughs for business/economics researchers. By raising awareness, the project team aims to encourage critical assessments of the economic and societal benefits associated with these advances and offer a fresh perspective to guide their further development.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.