Incentivizing Outsourced Computation

We describe different strategies a central authority, the boss, can use to distribute computation to untrusted contractors. Our problem is inspired by volunteer distributed computing projects such as SETI@home, which outsource computation to large numbers of participants. For many tasks, verifying a task\u27s output requires as much work as computing it again; additionally, some tasks may produce certain outputs with greater probability than others. A selfish contractor may try to exploit these factors, by submitting potentially incorrect results and claiming a reward. Further, malicious contractors may respond incorrectly, to cause direct harm or to create additional overhead for result-checking. We consider the scenario where there is a credit system whereby users can be rewarded for good work and fined for cheating. We show how to set rewards and fines that incentivize proper behavior from rational contractors, and mitigate the damage caused by malicious contractors. We analyze two strategies: random double-checking by the boss, and hiring multiple contractors to perform the same job. We also present a bounty mechanism when multiple contractors are employed; the key insight is to give a reward to a contractor who catches another worker cheating. Furthermore, if we can assume that at least a small fraction h of the contractors are honest (1% − 10%), then we can provide graceful degradation for the accuracy of the system and the work the boss has to perform. This is much better than the Byzantine approach, which typically assumes h > 60%

Mechanisms for Outsourcing Computation via a Decentralized Market

As the number of personal computing and IoT devices grows rapidly, so does the amount of computational power that is available at the edge. Since many of these devices are often idle, there is a vast amount of computational power that is currently untapped, and which could be used for outsourcing computation. Existing solutions for harnessing this power, such as volunteer computing (e.g., BOINC), are centralized platforms in which a single organization or company can control participation and pricing. By contrast, an open market of computational resources, where resource owners and resource users trade directly with each other, could lead to greater participation and more competitive pricing. To provide an open market, we introduce MODiCuM, a decentralized system for outsourcing computation. MODiCuM deters participants from misbehaving-which is a key problem in decentralized systems-by resolving disputes via dedicated mediators and by imposing enforceable fines. However, unlike other decentralized outsourcing solutions, MODiCuM minimizes computational overhead since it does not require global trust in mediation results. We provide analytical results proving that MODiCuM can deter misbehavior, and we evaluate the overhead of MODiCuM using experimental results based on an implementation of our platform

Optimal Contracts for Outsourced Computation

While expensive cryptographically verifiable computation aims at defeating malicious agents, many civil purposes of outsourced computation tolerate a weaker notion of security, i.e., “lazy-but-honest” contractors. Targeting this type of agents, we develop optimal contracts for outsourcing of computational tasks via appropriate use of rewards, punishments, auditing rate, and “redundancy”. Our contracts provably minimize the expense of the outsourcer (principal) while guaranteeing correct computation. Furthermore, we incorporate practical restrictions of the maximum enforceable fine, limited and/or costly auditing, and bounded budget of the outsourcer. By examining the optimal contracts, we provide insights on how resources should be utilized when auditing capacity and enforceability are limited. Finally, we present a light-weight cryptographic implementation of the contracts and discuss a comparison across different implementations of auditing in outsourced computation

Outsourcing Computation: the Minimal Refereed Mechanism

We consider a setting where a verifier with limited computation power delegates a resource intensive computation task---which requires a $T\times S$ computation tableau---to two provers where the provers are rational in that each prover maximizes their own payoff---taking into account losses incurred by the cost of computation. We design a mechanism called the Minimal Refereed Mechanism (MRM) such that if the verifier has $O(\log S + \log T)$ time and $O(\log S + \log T)$ space computation power, then both provers will provide a honest result without the verifier putting any effort to verify the results. The amount of computation required for the provers (and thus the cost) is a multiplicative $\log S$-factor more than the computation itself, making this schema efficient especially for low-space computations.Comment: 17 pages, 1 figure; WINE 2019: The 15th Conference on Web and Internet Economic

Betrayal, Distrust, and Rationality: Smart Counter-Collusion Contracts for Verifiable Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has become an irreversible trend. Together comes the pressing need for verifiability, to assure the client the correctness of computation outsourced to the cloud. Existing verifiable computation techniques all have a high overhead, thus if being deployed in the clouds, would render cloud computing more expensive than the on-premises counterpart. To achieve verifiability at a reasonable cost, we leverage game theory and propose a smart contract based solution. In a nutshell, a client lets two clouds compute the same task, and uses smart contracts to stimulate tension, betrayal and distrust between the clouds, so that rational clouds will not collude and cheat. In the absence of collusion, verification of correctness can be done easily by crosschecking the results from the two clouds. We provide a formal analysis of the games induced by the contracts, and prove that the contracts will be effective under certain reasonable assumptions. By resorting to game theory and smart contracts, we are able to avoid heavy cryptographic protocols. The client only needs to pay two clouds to compute in the clear, and a small transaction fee to use the smart contracts. We also conducted a feasibility study that involves implementing the contracts in Solidity and running them on the official Ethereum network.Comment: Published in ACM CCS 2017, this is the full version with all appendice

Proofless Verifiable Computation from Integer Factoring

VC schemes provide a mechanism for verifying the output of a remotely executed program. These are used to support computing paradigms wherein a computationally restricted client, the Verifier, wishes to delegate work to a more powerful but untrusted server, the Prover. The Verifier wishes to detect any incorrect results, be they accidental or malicious. The current state-of-the-art is only close-to-practical, usually because of a computationally demanding setup which must be amortised across repeat executions. We present a VC scheme for verifying the output of arithmetic circuits with a small one-time setup, KGen, independent of the size of the circuit being verified, and a insignificantly small constant program specific setup, ProbGen. To our knowledge our VC scheme is the first built from the hardness of integer factoring, a standard cryptographic assumption. Our scheme has the added novelty that the proofs are simply the raw output of the target computation, and the Prover is in effect blind to the fact they are taking part in a VC scheme at all. Compared to related work our scheme comes at the cost of a more expensive, but still efficient, verification step. Verification is always practical, and the Prover workload is unchanged from unverified outsourced computation. Although our scheme has worse asymptotic performance than the state-of-the-art it is particularly well suited for verifying one-shot programs and the output of large integer polynomial evaluation

How to Construct Rational Protocols with Nash Equilibrium Consistency in the UC framework

The inconsistency of Nash equilibrium of rational delegated computation scheme in the UC framework will lead to the lack of strict security proof of the protocols fundamentally. The consistency proof of Nash equilibrium between the ideal world and the real world has always been a challenge in the research field. In this paper, we analyze the Nash equilibrium according to the game model of rational delegated computation, and the ideal functionality for rational delegation of computation based on incentive-driven adversary is proposed, then we construct a rational delegated computation protocol for UC-realizing the ideal functionality. In a word, the proposed rational delegated computing protocol based on incentive-driven adversary has been proven to be secure in the universally composable framework, furthermore, we effectively solve the inconsistency problem of Nash equilibrium between the real world and the ideal world