DoTS: Berkeley Distributed Trust Stack

In recent years, there has been an explosion of applications leveraging decentralized trust in areas such as end-to-end encryption, blockchain, decentralized finance, BFT-like consensus, and secure multi-party computation (MPC). With the advent of web 3.0, decentralized trust is poised to power a wealth of applications.

Nevertheless, an application developer seeking to build a decentralized trust system encounters a plethora of challenges: deploying decentralized trust (via parties in distinct trust domains which are not controlled by the application owner), having expertise in developing necessary building blocks (e.g. trustworthy public key infrastructure, secret-sharding, and accessing secrets), and computing on building blocks in a decentralized manner. Often, removing a central point of attack results in another central point of attack in another layer of the stack, more sophisticated and difficult to discover.

In UC Berkeley’s Sky Lab, we are developing DoTS, a decentralized trust stack to enable developers to swiftly deploy and develop decentralized trust applications.

People

Core Team

Contributors

Publications

We have over a decade of expertise in decentralized trust, pre-dating mass industry adoption. In our research spanning security, systems, and cryptography, we have designed the common distributed trust systems people use today, including storage, authentication, databases, web systems, and learning systems.

  • Sijun Tan, Weikeng Chen, Ryan Deng, Raluca Ada Popa.
    MPCAuth: Multi-factor Authentication for Distributed-trust Systems.
    IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2023 (IEEE Symposium of Security and Privacy).