Cryptographic Foundation for Secure and Scalable Distributed Systems

Many of today’s criticaMany of today’s critical infrastructures such as power grids or cellular networks are distributed systems which arecomprised of autonomous nodes connected over a network.

To avoid single points of failure, a central goal indistributed systems is to implement such systems in a fault-tolerant manner. Fault-tolerant systems remain secure andavailable even if some minority of nodes crash or spread incorrect information. To improve robustness and scalability,cutting-edge systems frequently rely on cryptography.

In spite of its benefits, careless use of cryptography can incurperformance penalties or lead to vulnerabilities. Both of these aspects significantly complicate its use in practice. Asa result, many real-world systems use cryptography sparingly and therefore lack both robustness and scalability. Toimprove this unsatisfying state of affairs, the objectives of CRYPTOSYSTEMS are as follows:• New Formal Models.

Established formal models from cryptography and distributed systems pursue independentsecurity goals and therefore lack compatibility.

CRYPTOSYSTEMS will develop new, more appropriateformal models for analyzing the security of cryptographic distributed systems.• Efficient and Robust Distributed Algorithms. The use of cryptography is currently underexplored indistributed systems.

CRYPTOSYSTEMS will present exciting new applications of cryptography that will leadto the development of more robust and scalable distributed systems.• Cryptography for Distributed Algorithms. Cryptography is seldom developed with distributed algorithms asits primary use-case in mind. This results in inefficient or unwieldy cryptography which hampers the efficiencyof distributed algorithms.

To counteract this, CRYPTOSYSTEMS will develop cutting-edge cryptography suchas compact signatures and communication efficient distributed randomness generation routines. Importantly,these tools will be specifically geared toward use in distributed algorithms.