📋 Tender Overview
Cryptographic Foundation For Secure And Scalable Distributed Systems
Objective
Many of today’s criticaMany of today’s critical infrastructures such as power grids or cellular networks are distributed systems which are
comprised of autonomous nodes connected over a network. To avoid single points of failure, a central goal in
distributed systems is to implement such systems in a fault-tolerant manner. Fault-tolerant systems remain secure and
available even if some minority of nodes crash or spread incorrect information. To improve robustness and scalability,
cutting-edge systems frequently rely on cryptography. In spite of its benefits, careless use of cryptography can incur
performance penalties or lead to vulnerabilities. Both of these aspects significantly complicate its use in practice. As
a result, many real-world systems use cryptography sparingly and therefore lack both robustness and scalability. To
improve this unsatisfying state of affairs, the objectives of CRYPTOSYSTEMS are as follows:
• New Formal Models. Established formal models from cryptography and distributed systems pursue independent
security goals and therefore lack compatibility. CRYPTOSYSTEMS will develop new, more appropriate
formal models for analyzing the security of cryptographic distributed systems.
• Efficient and Robust Distributed Algorithms. The use of cryptography is currently underexplored in
distributed systems. CRYPTOSYSTEMS will present exciting new applications of cryptography that will lead
to the development of more robust and scalable distributed systems.
• Cryptography for Distributed Algorithms. Cryptography is seldom developed with distributed algorithms as
its primary use-case in mind. This results in inefficient or unwieldy cryptography which hampers the efficiency
of distributed algorithms. To counteract this, CRYPTOSYSTEMS will develop cutting-edge cryptography such
as compact signatures and communication efficient distributed randomness generation routines. Importantly,
these tools will be specifically geared toward use in distributed algorithms.
Funded Under
European Research Council (Erc)
Total Cost
€ 1 416 204,00
Eu Contribution
€ 1 416 204,00
Coordinated By
Cispa - Helmholtz-Zentrum Fur Informationssicherheit Ggmbh
Germany
