Delegation of computation with verification outsourcing: curious verifiers

  • Authors:

  • Gang Xu;George Amariucai;Yong Guan

  • Affiliations:

  • Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA;Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA;Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2013 ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

In the Cloud Computing paradigm, a user often reduces financial, personnel, and computational burdens by outsourcing computation and other IT services to a professional service provider. However, to be able to assure the correctness of the result, the user still needs to perform the verification himself. Such verification may be tedious and expensive. Consequently, users are likely to outsource (again) the verification workload to a third party. Other scenarios such as auditing and arbitrating may also require the use of thirdparty verification. Outsourcing verification will introduce new security challenges. One such challenge is to protect the computational task and the results from the untrusted third party verifier. In this work, we address this problem by proposing an efficient verification outsourcing scheme. To our knowledge, this is the first solution to the verification outsourcing problem. We show that, without using expensive fully-homomorphic encryption, an honest-but-curious third party can help to verify the result of an outsourced computational task without having to learn either the computational task or the result thereof. We have implemented our design by combining a novel commitment protocol and an additive-homomorphic encryption in the argument system model. The total cost of the verification in our design is less than the verifier's cost in the state-of-the-art argument systems that rely only on standard cryptographic assumptions.