Cloud computation can be summarized as outsourcing a computation job that is infeasible or expensive to do with one’s own resources to others with more computation resources. Two main types of these mechanisms are:

  • P2P (peer-to-peer) cloud: Outsourcing the job to multiple entities
  • Giant cloud: Outsourcing the job to a more powerful entity (e.g., Amazon EC2)

Cloud computing presents unique challenges that need to be addressed by cryptography and security experts, as well as game theory and mechanism design principles. Our goal is to combine different techniques to ensure result reliability and inline participation incentives. Further goals may include computation privacy, such as privacy of queries and data in outsourced databases.

We also have efficient solutions for fair and secure two-party and multi-party computation (2PC and MPC). These solutions enable two or more parties to compute a function together, where each party provides some input, but the other parties do not learn any useful information about that input (except, of course, the output of the function). We enable such protocols to be done fairly efficiently, where either all parties receive the output of the computation, or no one receives anything useful.

Related Publications:

  1. Alptekin Küpçü, “Incentivized Outsourced Computation Resistant to Malicious Contractors“, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing 14(6): 633 – 649, Nov 2017. (See also Cryptology ePrint Archive Report 2014/992).
  2. Handan Kılınç, Alptekin Küpçü, “Efficiently Making Secure Two-Party Computation Fair“, FC 2016. (See also Cryptology ePrint Archive Report2014/896).
  3. Alptekin Küpçü, Payman Mohassel, “Fast Optimistically Fair Cut-and-Choose 2PC“, FC 2016. (See also Cryptology ePrint Archive Report 2015/1209).
  4. Handan Kılınç, Alptekin Küpçü, “Optimally Efficient Multi-Party Fair Exchange and Fair Secure Multi-Party Computation“, CT-RSA 2015. (See also Cryptology ePrint Archive Report 2015/064).
  5. Mira Belenkiy, Melissa Chase, C. Chris Erway, John Jannotti, Alptekin Küpçü, Anna Lysyanskaya, “Incentivizing Outsourced Computation“, ACM SIGCOMM NetEcon 2008Crypto 2008 Rump Session slides] [Video of the presentation at Microsoft Research Redmond Cryptography Colloquium]

Project Funding:

We are grateful for the support from TÜBİTAK and European Union COST Action IC1306.