Cryptographic Foundation for Secure and Scalable Distributed Systems

Introduction

Many of today's critical infrastructures, such as power grids or cellular networks, are distributed systems comprised of autonomous nodes connected over a network. To avoid single points of failure, a central goal in distributed systems is to implement such systems in a fault-tolerant manner. Fault-tolerant systems remain secure and available even if some minority of nodes crash or spread incorrect information.

Challenges in Cryptography

To improve robustness and scalability, cutting-edge systems frequently rely on cryptography. In spite of its benefits, careless use of cryptography can incur performance penalties or lead to vulnerabilities. Both of these aspects significantly complicate its use in practice. As a result, many real-world systems use cryptography sparingly and therefore lack both robustness and scalability.

Objectives of CRYPTOSYSTEMS

To improve this unsatisfying state of affairs, the objectives of CRYPTOSYSTEMS are as follows:

1. New Formal Models
   Established formal models from cryptography and distributed systems pursue independent security goals and therefore lack compatibility. CRYPTOSYSTEMS will develop new, more appropriate formal models for analyzing the security of cryptographic distributed systems.

2. Efficient and Robust Distributed Algorithms
   The use of cryptography is currently underexplored in distributed systems. CRYPTOSYSTEMS will present exciting new applications of cryptography that will lead to the development of more robust and scalable distributed systems.

3. Cryptography for Distributed Algorithms
   Cryptography is seldom developed with distributed algorithms as its primary use-case in mind. This results in inefficient or unwieldy cryptography which hampers the efficiency of distributed algorithms. To counteract this, CRYPTOSYSTEMS will develop cutting-edge cryptography such as compact signatures and communication-efficient distributed randomness generation routines. Importantly, these tools will be specifically geared toward use in distributed algorithms.