Nicholas Ngai

EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley

Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2023-256

December 1, 2023

http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2023/EECS-2023-256.pdf

Distributed trust applications provide strong guarantees of security, in that they require a set of multiple "trust domains" to be compromised in order to compromise an entire application, rather than relying on a central point of attack, which is often the target of attacks and data breaches. Yet, distributed trust has yet to see wide-scale adoption despite its plethora of benefits.

The DoTS platform intially proposed and presented by Tan and Kaviani promises to solve many of these issues by addressing the practical needs of distributed trust applications as a software development kit for developers to build applications with distributed trust. In this paper, we present mid- and low-level architectural modifications to the DoTS platform in order to make the platform and API more accessible to developers, while fulfilling its original vision.

We demonstrate both that our modifications maintain the simplicity of developing new applications on top of DoTS, with our secret key recovery and $(n, t)$-threshold ECDSA signing applciations requiring fewer than 500 lines of integration code each, and we demonstrate that it is equally easy to port existing applications to utilize the DoTS platform, replacing over 2,600 lines of code in MP-SPDZ with simple function invocations.

We show that, by leveraging the unique conditions of such applications typically executing in distinct trust domains in geographically separated regions, applications utilizing the updated DoTS design suffer as little as 6.4-9.5% overhead compared to ad hoc, complex, application-specific network solutions.

Advisors: Raluca Ada Popa

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BibTeX citation:

@mastersthesis{Ngai:EECS-2023-256,
    Author= {Ngai, Nicholas},
    Title= {Enabling Non-Experts to Develop Distributed Trust Applications},
    School= {EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley},
    Year= {2023},
    Month= {Dec},
    Url= {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2023/EECS-2023-256.html},
    Number= {UCB/EECS-2023-256},
    Abstract= {Distributed trust applications provide strong guarantees of security, in that they require a set of multiple "trust domains" to be compromised in order to compromise an entire application, rather than relying on a central point of attack, which is often the target of attacks and data breaches. Yet, distributed trust has yet to see wide-scale adoption despite its plethora of benefits.

The DoTS platform intially proposed and presented by Tan and Kaviani promises to solve many of these issues by addressing the practical needs of distributed trust applications as a software development kit for developers to build applications with distributed trust. In this paper, we present mid- and low-level architectural modifications to the DoTS platform in order to make the platform and API more accessible to developers, while fulfilling its original vision.

We demonstrate both that our modifications maintain the simplicity of developing new applications on top of DoTS, with our secret key recovery and $(n, t)$-threshold ECDSA signing applciations requiring fewer than 500 lines of integration code each, and we demonstrate that it is equally easy to port existing applications to utilize the DoTS platform, replacing over 2,600 lines of code in MP-SPDZ with simple function invocations.

We show that, by leveraging the unique conditions of such applications typically executing in distinct trust domains in geographically separated regions, applications utilizing the updated DoTS design suffer as little as 6.4-9.5% overhead compared to ad hoc, complex, application-specific network solutions.},
}

EndNote citation:

%0 Thesis
%A Ngai, Nicholas 
%T Enabling Non-Experts to Develop Distributed Trust Applications
%I EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley
%D 2023
%8 December 1
%@ UCB/EECS-2023-256
%U http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2023/EECS-2023-256.html
%F Ngai:EECS-2023-256