During the 37th Annual IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, Professor Bryan Ford presented his group’s1 accepted paper “Keeping Authorities ‘Honest or Bust’ with Decentralized Witness Cosigning”. Professor Ford leads the Decentralized / Distributed Systems (DEDIS) lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), formerly the DeDis group at Yale University.
In the symposium presentation, Dr. Ford discussed his and his colleagues’ work and deployment of a CoSi prototype that included a small-scale test configuration on the public Internet with a much larger scale-up evaluation -- up to 33,000 cosigning witnesses -- on DETERLab. As described by Ford, CoSi is a witness cosigning protocol that enables authoritative statements to be validated and cosigned by thousands of witnesses in just a few seconds. CoSi makes witness cosigning scalable in that it can produce collective signatures comparable in size to a single individual signature and does this nearly as quickly and easily for clients to verify.
This is one important example of the value that DETERLab provides to researchers in terms of access to infrastructure and tools to scale experiments. Professor Ford is focused on building secure decentralized systems that include private and anonymous communications technologies, Internet architecture, and secure operating systems. To learn more about his work, visit: http://www.brynosaurus.com
1 Ewa Syta, Iulia Tamas, Dylan Visher, David Isaac Wolinsky, Philipp Jovanovic, Linus Gasser, Nicolas Gailly, Ismail Khoffi, and Bryan Ford.