Ph.D Student | Riabzev Michael |
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Subject | Computation Verification for Noobs |
Department | Department of Computer Science | Supervisor | Professor Yuval Ishai |
Full Thesis text | ![]() |
Computational-integrity
(also known as checking-computation [BFLS91], verifiable-computation [PGHR13,CFHKKNPZ15],
and computation-delegation [GKR08]) protocols eliminate the need to trust
reporters of computation results, by allowing the latter to provide a
cryptographic proof attesting to the validity of the results. The proof
verification time is polylogarithmic with the length of the computation
(succinct), introducing significant improvement over the naive solution
for general computations, which is merely re-execution. Computational-integrity
protocols were introduced around three decades ago [BFLS91]. This original work
offered theoretical solutions to practical problems. An immediate
practical motivation for taking such an approach comes from a different field
of mathematical-proofs done by computer such as the celebrated example of
[AH79] showing that any planar graph is four-colourable. The method used
in [AH79] included a computer exhaustively verifying correctness of a finite
set of graphs, requiring work beyond what is humanly achievable, and took
over a thousand hours to complete using the computer. Obviously, anyone
who did not want to repeat this heavy verification process had to put
their trust in the researcher who claimed to execute it. This kind of a
proof to a mathematical claim was novel,
and the fact the proof cannot be easily verified by peer reviews
disappointed many. Computational-integrity is a natural solution to such
problems, as it can be used by researchers to generate a succinct proof for the
integrity of any computation, verifiable by anyone. Unfortunately, the
work of [AH79] predated the initial ideas of verifiable computation,
introduced in [BFLS91], by roughly a decade. Even though roughly
three decades have passed since the introduction of [BFLS91], it is
still probably infeasible to use modern computational-integrity for problems of
such complexity. Although there are implementations of succinct verifiers that
can succinctly verify the correctness of a small proof, the computation
overhead on the prover, compared to the naive computation, is still too high. The
line of research work we present shows what we have done in order to advance
the field of computational-integrity from theory to practice. Our results
show how theory can be improved to provide concrete efficiency. A common
technique we have used is adding interactivity to both improve the soundness of
protocols, and reduce the proving computational load. In addition to
theoretical improvements, we provide three POC implementations of systems used to
measure the constructions' concrete efficiency. Moreover, the
implementations can be used as a reference for production grade system, as they
introduce efficient data-structures and algorithms designed and tuned for
implementation of algebraic proof systems.