SaTC: CORE: Small: Collaborative: Proof of Work Without All the Work

Mississippi State University, Mississippi State MS

Investigators

Abstract

Proof-of-work (PoW) is an economic tool used to deter network attacks by requiring participants to perform verifiable work, typically by solving computational puzzles. Unfortunately, there is a significant barrier impeding wide-spread applicability: PoW is expensive. This project aims to significantly reduce the cost of PoW schemes, and thereby broaden their utility. Our general model concerns a distributed system consisting of good and bad identifiers (IDs). The good IDs have two goals: (1) ensure fair sharing of a limited resource; and (2) securely perform distributed computations. The bad IDs are controlled by an attacker who possesses a constant fraction of the computational resources, and tries to subvert these goals. An important security objective is to develop mechanisms that preserve these goals while incurring bandwidth and computational costs that scale with the magnitude of an attack. That is, when there is no attack, costs are low; conversely, when there is an attack, the good IDs' cost grows commensurately with the attacker's cost. This project focuses on the design of distributed algorithms for: (i) tolerating large attacks while having good IDs spend asymptotically less than the attacker; (ii) handling a setting where participants are selfish but rational; and (iii) designing fast and robust diffuse protocols via attack-resistant overlays with low state and bandwidth costs. The project provides research experience for undergraduate and underrepresented students, incorporates state-of-the-art results into course development, and establishes a workshop venue for cybersecurity researchers to share their findings. 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.