Award Abstract # 1943499
CAREER: Composable Programming Abstractions for Secure Distributed Computing and Blockchain Applications

NSF Org: CNS
Division Of Computer and Network Systems
Recipient: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
Initial Amendment Date: February 28, 2020
Latest Amendment Date: February 26, 2025
Award Number: 1943499
Award Instrument: Continuing Grant
Program Manager: Selcuk Uluagac
suluagac@nsf.gov
 (703)292-4540
CNS
 Division Of Computer and Network Systems
CSE
 Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Start Date: June 1, 2020
End Date: May 31, 2026 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $521,748.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $521,748.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2020 = $99,520.00
FY 2021 = $101,863.00

FY 2022 = $104,278.00

FY 2023 = $106,763.00

FY 2024 = $109,324.00
History of Investigator:
  • Nikita Borisov (Principal Investigator)
    nikita@uiuc.edu
  • Andrew Miller (Former Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
506 S WRIGHT ST
URBANA
IL  US  61801-3620
(217)333-2187
Sponsor Congressional District: 13
Primary Place of Performance: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
506 S. Wright Street
Urbana
IL  US  61801-3620
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
13
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): Y8CWNJRCNN91
Parent UEI: V2PHZ2CSCH63
NSF Program(s): Secure &Trustworthy Cyberspace
Primary Program Source: 01002021DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
01002122DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT

01002223DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT

01002324DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT

01002425DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 025Z, 1045
Program Element Code(s): 806000
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.070

ABSTRACT

Secure distributed systems are showing great promise for digitizing and increasing information sharing in several industries. For example, the financial industry is now experimenting with blockchains and smart contract protocols to improve efficiency and combat fraud in digital asset markets. However, state-of-the-art systems require increasingly complex designs to meet performance and security requirements. For example, they incorporate parallel or partitioned architectures for better performance, as well as cryptographic techniques like zero knowledge proofs to mitigate privacy risks. Furthermore, some of the most successful distributed systems are platforms that can be extended by non-expert application developers writing customized ?smart contract? programs. All of these complicate the task of defining security, let alone proving it, and as a result most distributed systems are still deployed without any rigorous security model at all. This project will address the above challenges by designing new programming language abstractions for defining and analyzing the security of distributed protocols.

This project is organized along two research directions. The first goal is to bridge the field of programming language design and the widely-used Universal Composability (UC) theory from cryptography. UC a popular standard because of its modularity and strong guarantees, and is widely used for on-paper analysis of blockchain protocols; integrating this into a programming framework will enable application developers to benefit from this modular design approach. The second research thrust aims to explore a new distributed system architecture, called ?robust sharded MPC," aimed at providing better scalability and security than existing designs. Combining robust multiparty computation (MPC) together with zero knowledge proofs (ZKP) will be able to overcome the expressiveness limitations of the current state-of-the-art, where ZKP is used alone. By bridging distributed systems and applied cryptography, the approach is unique in using robust sharded MPC to overcome limitations of the state-of-the-art based on zero knowledge proofs alone. The project will release open source software and to help validate the security of blockchain protocols deployed or in development today, and to support courses and curriculum.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

Note:  When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

Das, Sourav and Yurek, Thomas and Xiang, Zhuolun and Miller, Andrew and Kokoris-Kogias, Lefteris and Ren, Ling "Practical Asynchronous Distributed Key Generation" 2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP) , 2022 https://doi.org/10.1109/SP46214.2022.9833584 Citation Details
Jean-Louis, Nerla and Li, Yunqi and Ji, Yan and Malvai, Harjasleen and Yurek, Thomas and Bellemare, Sylvain and Miller, Andrew "SGXonerated: Finding (and Partially Fixing) Privacy Flaws in TEE-based Smart Contract Platforms Without Breaking the TEE" Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies , v.2024 , 2024 https://doi.org/10.56553/popets-2024-0035 Citation Details
Kanjalkar, Sanket and Zhang, Ye and Gandlur, Shreyas and Miller, Andrew "Publicly Auditable MPC-as-a-Service with succinct verification and universal setup" 2021 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW) , 2021 https://doi.org/10.1109/EuroSPW54576.2021.00048 Citation Details
Kappos, George and Yousaf, Haaroon and Piotrowska, Ania and Kanjalkar, Sanket and Delgado-Segura, Sergi and Miller, Andrew and Meiklejohn, Sarah "An Empirical Analysis of Privacy in the Lightning Network" Financial Cryptography and Data Security , 2021 Citation Details
Thomas Yurek, Zhuolun Xiang "Long Live The Honey Badger: Robust Asynchronous DPSS and its Applications" The 32nd USENIX Security Symposium , 2023 Citation Details
Yurek, Thomas and Luo, Licheng and Fairoze, Jaiden and Kate, Aniket and Miller, Andrew "hbACSS: How to Robustly Share Many Secrets" Proceedings 2022 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium , 2022 https://doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2022.23120 Citation Details

Please report errors in award information by writing to: awardsearch@nsf.gov.

Print this page

Back to Top of page