Title: Adopting and Scaling Secure Systems with Distributed Trust
Speaker: Vivian Fang
Advisor: Raluca Ada Popa
Date: Friday, April 25, 2025
Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm PDT
This is a hybrid event held in person and virtually over Zoom.
Location (In Person): 420 Soda
Abstract: Distributed trust is an emerging design pattern that enables building secure systems with strong privacy and integrity guarantees. Yet, adopting these systems in practice poses significant hurdles, from requiring specialized cryptographic expertise to scaling performance and materializing independent trust among parties. To this end, we introduce a suite of works aimed at making secure systems with distributed trust more practical, scalable, and ultimately deployable. On usability, we develop CostCO, an automatic cost-modeling framework for secure multi-party computation protocols, and LegoLog, a configurable transparency log system that automatically generates logs tailored to specific application workloads. We explore scaling oblivious storage in Snoopy, a system capable of scaling throughput linearly with the number of machines without sacrificing security. Finally, we present SVR3, a practical solution for secret key recovery that distributes trust across heterogeneous hardware enclaves in order to protect secrets at scale for hundreds of millions of users.