2018-annual-report

68
POST
POST: Novel Constructions of Proof-of-Spacetime
annual report
20
Funding: Protocol Labs
Duration: 2018-2019
Principal Investigators: Asst. Res. Prof. Dario Fiore – Post. Res. Matteo Campanelli
Proofs of Space Time (PoST) allow a user to show she has been storing a file for a certain amount of time.
They are an important building block of the FileCoin protocol. Current constructions for PoST are based on the
following paradigm: iterate a Proof of Replication (PoRep) and prove that all the repetitions are correct through
a SNARK system. Unfortunately, applying even a state-of-art general purpose SNARK would result in PoST
with impractical performances on the prover’s side. The goal of this project is to design new PoST developing
new SNARKs that are especially tailored to Proofs of Replication and their iteration.
INTEL
Information Flow Tracking across the Hardware-Software
Boundary
Funding: Intel Corporation
Duration: 2018-2021
Principal Investigators: Asst. Res. Prof. Boris Köpf – Post.
Res. Marco Guarnieri.
This project focuses on the development of a novel, principled approach for software defenses against SPECTRE-style
attacks. Its key feature is that it is backed by semantic security guarantees, yet it does not require programmers to provide
any specification or annotations. It will pave the way to formally characterize the security guarantees envisioned by the
project; these will lead to a blueprint for the design, implementation, and evaluation of program analysis techniques
to detect this kind of attacks. The project is completely funded by Intel, and puts together a team from the IMDEA
Software Institute, the University of Saarland, the Catholic University of Leuven, and the Technical University of Graz.
NEC
Secure Cloud Storage with Controlled Computation
Funding: NEC
Duration: 2018-2019
Principal Investigator: Asst. Res. Prof. Dario Fiore
IMDEA researchers have started a research program funded by NEC to investigate in two major directions. On
the one side, they plan to devise cryptographic schemes that reconciliate user privacy with the great computational
power of cloud providers that is key in computations over large data sets. On the other hand, they will
investigate what benefits can secure hardware provide in this context and how secure hardware can improve
the provisions of cryptographic protocols for cloud storage.