Ethan Cecchetti
Friday, Aug 31, 2018 at 11:30 AM in 380 Soda Hall
Title: One File for the Price of Three: Catching Cheating Servers in Decentralized Storage Networks
Abstract: Decentralized Storage Networks (DSNs) aim to store data on spare disk space owned by arbitrary strangers. These unknown computers may be unreliable or untrustworthy, so each file must be stored in redundant fashion. But how do you check that there are actually, say, three copies of the data, not three colluding servers with one copy total? This is particularly challenging when the file must be publicly readable and there is no single author (e.g., a Wikipedia article or the state of the Ethereum blockchain). In this talk I will introduce the first provably secure, practical Public Incompressible Encoding (PIE). PIEs are a core building block needed to verify that potentially-cheating servers are redundantly storing public data. A full copy of this work is available on the IACR ePrint Archive: https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/684.pdf
Bio: Ethan is a fourth year PhD student at Cornell University working with Ari Juels and Andrew Myers and is a member of the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies & Contracts (IC3). His work focuses on designing secure systems and building tools to ease their development. More information is available at his website: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ethan/