Building blocks for robust, private, and decentralized computation

The Internet has become increasingly centralized. While the early internet of the 90's and early 2000's could be described as an eclectic and often chaotic collection of decentralized niche communities, market forces have pushed the internet increasingly towards the centralization of information and the surveillance of internet users. In response, a new movement has emerged which seeks to create decentralized infrastructure which avoids the need for trusted authorities and respects user privacy. However, this is an incredibly daunting task: trustless decentralized services are inherently more difficult to build than trusted centralized ones, and moreover, many of the tools and techniques needed to make competitive decentralized infrastructure do not yet exist. This work aims to take a step towards remedying this issue and focuses primarily on tools to build multiparty computation: a privacy-respecting method of computing useful information from private user data. More specifically, we focus on the deployment of the first functional prototypes of decentralized protocols which simultaneously operate under the most restrictive network settings and tolerate as much active interference as possible.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Yurek, Thomas James

Contributors dc:contributor

• Miller, Andrew
• Kate, Aniket
• Ren, Ling
• Borisov, Nikita
• Levchenko, Kirill

• Multiparty Computation
• Secret Sharing
• Cryptography
• Asynchronous

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2023 Thomas Yurek

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/121526

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F121526