### Betrayal, Distrust, and Rationality: Smart Counter-Collusion Contracts for Verifiable Cloud Computing

Changyu Dong, Yilei Wang, Amjad Aldweesh, Patrick McCorry, and Aad van Moorsel

##### Abstract

Cloud computing has become an irreversible trend. Together comes the pressing need for verifiability, to assure the client the correctness of computation outsourced to the cloud. Existing verifiable computation techniques all have a high overhead, thus if being deployed in the clouds, would render cloud computing more expensive than the on-premises counterpart. To achieve verifiability at a reasonable cost, we leverage game theory and propose a smart contract based solution. In a nutshell, a client lets two clouds compute the same task, and uses smart contracts to stimulate tension, betrayal and distrust between the clouds, so that rational clouds will not collude and cheat. In the absence of collusion, verification of correctness can be done easily by crosschecking the results from the two clouds. We provide a formal analysis of the games induced by the contracts, and prove that the contracts will be effective under certain reasonable assumptions. By resorting to game theory and smart contracts, we are able to avoid heavy cryptographic protocols. The client only needs to pay two clouds to compute in the clear, and a small transaction fee to use the smart contracts. We also conducted a feasibility study that involves implementing the contracts in Solidity and running them on the official Ethereum network.

Note: Full version of the paper.

##### Metadata
Available format(s)
Publication info
Published elsewhere. MINOR revision.ACM CCS 2017
DOI
10.1145/3133956.3134032
Keywords
Verifiable ComputingSmart ContractGame TheoryCollusionTrust
Contact author(s)
changyu dong @ gmail com
History
2018-05-23: revised
2018-05-23: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2018/489
License

CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2018/489,
author = {Changyu Dong and Yilei Wang and Amjad Aldweesh and Patrick McCorry and Aad van Moorsel},
title = {Betrayal, Distrust, and Rationality: Smart Counter-Collusion Contracts for Verifiable Cloud Computing},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2018/489},
year = {2018},
doi = {10.1145/3133956.3134032},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/489}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/489}
}

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