International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 01 December 2014

Craig Costello, Cédric Fournet, Jon Howell, Markulf Kohlweiss, Benjamin Kreuter, Michael Naehrig, Bryan Parno, Samee Zahur
ePrint Report ePrint Report
Cloud computing sparked interest in Verifiable Computation protocols, which allow a weak client to securely outsource computations to remote parties. Recent work has dramatically reduced the client\'s cost to verify the correctness of results, but the overhead to produce proofs largely remains impractical.

Geppetto introduces complementary techniques for reducing prover overhead and increasing prover flexibility. With Multi-QAPs, Geppetto reduces the cost of sharing state between computations (e.g., for MapReduce) or within a single computation by up to two orders of magnitude. Via a careful instantiation of cryptographic primitives, Geppetto also brings down the cost of verifying outsourced cryptographic computations (e.g., verifiably computing on signed data); together with Geppetto\'s notion of bounded proof bootstrapping, Geppetto improves on prior bootstrapped systems by five orders of magnitude, albeit at some cost in universality. Geppetto also supports qualitatively new properties like verifying the correct execution of proprietary (i.e., secret) algorithms. Finally, Geppetto\'s use of energy-saving circuits brings the prover\'s costs more in line with the program\'s actual (rather than worst-case) execution time.

Geppetto is implemented in a full-fledged, scalable compiler that consumes LLVM code generated from a variety of apps, as well as a large cryptographic library.

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