## Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2020/843

Dragoon: Private Decentralized HITs Made Practical

Yuan Lu and Qiang Tang and Guiling Wang

Abstract: With the rapid popularity of blockchain, decentralized human intelligence tasks (HITs) are proposed to crowdsource human knowledge without relying on vulnerable third-party platforms. However, the inherent limits of blockchain cause decentralized HITs to face a few new'' challenges. For example, the confidentiality of solicited data turns out to be the sine qua non, though it was an arguably dispensable property in the centralized setting. To ensure the new'' requirement of data privacy, existing decentralized HITs use generic zero-knowledge proof frameworks (e.g., SNARK), but scarcely perform well in practice, due to the inherently expensive cost of generality.

We present a practical decentralized protocol for HITs, which also achieves the fairness between requesters and workers. At the core of our contributions, we avoid the powerful yet highly-costly generic zk-proof tools and propose a special-purpose scheme to prove the quality of encrypted data. By various non-trivial statement reformations, proving the quality of encrypted data is reduced to efficient verifiable decryption, thus making decentralized HITs practical. Along the way, we rigorously define the ideal functionality of decentralized HITs and then prove the security due to the ideal/real paradigm.

We further instantiate our protocol to implement a system called Dragoon, an instance of which is deployed atop Ethereum to facilitate an image annotation task used by ImageNet. Our evaluations demonstrate its practicality: the on-chain handling cost of Dragoon is even less than the handling fee of Amazon's Mechanical Turk for the same ImageNet HIT.

Category / Keywords: applications / Privacy; human intelligence task; decentralized application; blockchain

Original Publication (with minor differences): This paper will appear in the 40th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2020) with minor differences.