CS 294-163: Decentralized Security: Theory and Systems

Lectures: Tue/Thur 3:30pm - 4:59pm, 310 Soda

This course is a graduate seminar on theory and systems for decentralized security. Recently, there has been much excitement in both academia and industry around the notion of decentralized security, which refers to, loosely speaking, security mechanisms that do not rely on the trustworthiness of any central entity. In only a few years, this area has generated many beautiful cryptographic constructs as well as exciting systems with real-world adoption. The course will cover topics such as decentralized ledgers, blockchain/cryptocurrencies, decentralized access control, secure multi-party computation, federated learning, coopetitive learning, and others. (3 units)

This is an advanced course, which will go deeply into both cryptography and systems. A solid foundation in cryptography is required, and a similar foundation in systems is beneficial.

Staff:

Instructor: Raluca Ada Popa
Co-Instructor+TA: Pratyush Mishra
Special guests: Alice, Bob and the adversary

Office hours: Tuesdays 2-3PM in Soda 729 (Raluca); Fridays 2-3PM in Soda 347 (Pratyush)

Piazza:

Sign up for this course's Piazza. Please don't hesitate to ask questions to the class and have discussions there. Moreover, you can use it to find course project teammates.

Contact: Got a question? Post on Piazza.

Course overview:

Prerequisites: CS 162 and CS 161 or equivalent. A strong foundation in cryptography and math is required. A solid knowledge of computer systems is helpful.

Assignments:

Readings: Each class will have a set of assigned readings, accompanied by questions. Please summarize each reading into 1-2 paragraphs and answer the questions and submit the text at cs294.f19@gmail.com before the start of the corresponding lecture. Send these all in one email (in the body, plaintext), whose subject should be the date of the lecture they are about "Reading MM/DD". Your full name should be apparent in the from field or in the email.
Final project: The final project is an important component of the class. The final project is described further on the final project page.

Grading:

reading assignments 30%
class participation 10%
final project (presentation and writeup) 60%

Date	Crypto	Systems	Readings
Aug 29	Authenticated data structures	Ledgers	Course overview Merkle Trees Section 8.9, Boneh-Shoup Providing Authentication and Integrity in Outsourced Databases using Merkle Hash Trees, Mykletun et al.
Sept 3			Key Transparency (questions) (answers) (slides) CONIKS, Melara et al. Optionally, Certificate Transparency This Google talk The RFC for CT: RFC6962
Sept 5			WAVE - Decentralized authorization. (questions) (answers) (slides)
Sept 10	Secure multi-party computation		Garbled circuits. (questions) (answers) A Gentle Introduction to Garbled Circuits, [Section 1.1], Yakoubov. The Simplest Protocol for Oblivious Transfer [Section 1.0], Chou and Orlandi. Optionally, this lecture by Mike Rosulek on optimizing GCs
Sept 12	Secure multi-party computation	Collaborative learning	Training linear models with garbled circuits. (questions) (answers) Privacy-Preserving Ridge Regression on Hundreds of Millions of Records [everything except Sections IV.E, IV.F, and IV.G], Nikolaenko et al.
Sept 17			Introduction to federated learning, with guest lecturer Min Du, UC Berkeley. (slides) (questions) (answers) Google blogpost on Federated Learning Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data, McMahan et al.
Sept 19			Attacks on federated learning, with guest lecturer Nicholas Carlini, Google. (questions) (answers) How to Backdoor Federated Learning, Bagdasaryan et al.
Sept 24	Secure multi-party computation	Collaborative analytics and learning	Secure aggregation in federated learning. (questions) Practical Secure Aggregation for Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning, Sections 1-5 (Optional Sections 6-10)
Sept 26			Federated generative models, federated analytics, and deploying FL in production, with guest lecturer Sean Augenstein, Google. (slides) (no readings and no questions)
Oct 1	Secure multi-party computation		Private queries for federated databases. (questions) (answers) (slides) SMCQL: Secure Querying for Federated Databases, Bater et al.
Oct 3			Proposal due before class Semi-honest SPDZ (questions) (answers) Introduction to SPDZ I Introduction to SPDZ II
Oct 8		Collaborative learning	Securely training ML models via 2PC techniques with guest lecturer Payman Mohassel. (questions) (answers) SecureML: A System for Scalable Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning [Sections 1-4, rest optional], Mohassel and Zhang (video). (Optional) ABY³: A Mixed Protocol Framework for Machine Learning, Mohassel and Rindal (video).
Oct 10	Differential privacy		Introduction to differential privacy (questions) (answers) A high-level introduction to differential privacy Formalizing differential privacy Differential privacy in practice (ε,δ)-differential privacy Local vs. global differential privacy
Oct 15	Differential privacy		Systems for differential privacy, with guest lecturer Mathias Lécuyer (questions) Privacy Accounting and Quality Control in the Sage Differentially Private ML Platform, Lécuyer et al.
Oct 17	Malicious MPC		Malicious SPDZ (questions) Overdrive: Making SPDZ Great Again [Section 2.4], Keller et al. A Pragmatic Introduction to Secure Multi-Party Computation [Chapter 6.6.2], Evans et al. hands-on tutorial!
Oct 22	Malicious MPC	Collaborative learning	Coopetitive training. (questions) Helen: Maliciously Secure Coopetitive Learning for Linear Models, Zheng et al (video).
Oct 24	Blockchain/Ledgers (distributed consensus, cryptocurrency)		Bitcoin (questions) The Bitcoin Whitepaper, Satoshi Nakamoto. (Optional) How the Bitcoin Protocol actually works, Michael Nielsen. (Optional) Introduction to Bitcoin (5:00 onwards), Georg Fuchsbauer.
Oct 29			Ethereum (questions) The Ethereum Whitepaper. hands-on tutorial!
Oct 31			Introduction to consensus (no questions) Optional reading: PBFT Castro and Liskov. Optional reading: Authenticated Algorithms for Byzantine Agreement, Dolev and Strong.
Nov 5			XRP Ledger (Ripple), with guest lecturers from the XRP team Readings (questions)
Nov 7			Algorand, with guest lecturer Derek Leung (questions). (lecture notes). Algorand: Scaling Byzantine Agreements for Cryptocurrencies, Gilad et al.
Nov 12	Zero-knowledge proofs		Intro to zero-knowledge proofs (questions). Lectures notes from a course by Boaz Barak. hands-on tutorial!
Nov 14		Blockchain/Ledgers	Decentralized Private Payments (questions). Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin [Section I, II, III-A, III-B, IV], Ben-Sasson et al (Optional: video).
Nov 19			Proofs of solvency, with guest lecturer Kostas Chalkias, Calibra. (questions). Proof of solvency: technical overview Provisions: Privacy-preserving Proofs of Solvency for Bitcoin Exchanges [Pages 1-7], Dagher et al. (Optional: pages 8-33).
Nov 21			Stellar, with guest lecturer Prof. David Mazières. Fast and secure global payments with Stellar, Lokhava et al. (questions)
Nov 26	Final project presentations
Dec 3	Final project presentations
Dec 5	Final project presentations
Dec 13	Final Project Report due at 11:59PM!

Related Courses

CS 261: Graduate computer security
CS 261N: Internet/network security
CS 276: Cryptography
CS 294: This is a special topics class that may cover security in some semesters

Security books

Ross Anderson, Security Engineering, John Wiley & Sons, 2001. A book on security in real world systems.
Jonathan Katz and Yehuda Lindell, Introduction to Modern Cryptography, CRC Press, 2007.
Niels Ferguson, Bruce Schneier, and Tadayoshi Kohno, Cryptography Engineering, Wiley, 2010.
Mark Stamp, Information Security: Principles and Practice, John Wiley & and Sons, 2006.
Alfred Menezes, Paul van Oorschot, Scott Vanstone, Handbook of Applied Cryptography, CRC Press, 1997. This is a very comprehensive book. You can download this book online!
Simson Garfinkel, Gene Spafford, Web Security, Privacy & Commerce, O'Reilly, 2002. It's hard to keep up with all the security software out there. But these authors do a good job documenting it all.
Charlie Kaufman, Radia Perlman, Mike Speciner, Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World, 2nd Edition, Prentice Hall, 2002. The authors discuss network security from a very applied approach. There is a lot of discussion about real systems, all the way down to the IETF RFCs and the on-the-wire bit representations.
Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography, 2nd Edition, John Wiley & Sons, 1996. This is the best book to read for an introduction to applied security and cryptography. There is much less math than the book by Menezes et al. The bibliography is very comprehensive too.
Eric Rescorla, SSL and TLS: Designing and Building Secure Systems, Addison-Wesley, 2001. A book about the evolution, politics, and bugs in the development of SSL.
Jakob Nielsen, Usability Engineering, Academic Press, 1993. There are a lot of non-intuitive GUIs out there for security products. Anyone making a security product for use by humans should learn about the principles of smart GUIs.
Phillip Hallam-Baker, The dotCrime Manifesto: How to Stop Internet Crime, Addison-Wesley, 2008.
Jonathan Katz, Yehuda Lindell, Introduction to Modern Cryptography, Chapman & Hall/CRC Press, 2007. This book contains a broad coverage of cryptography.

Simons Institute Programs (with videos!)

Conferences

Building secure systems involves innovating in both systems and security. Therefore, the top conferences in this field are both systems and security conferences.

Related Courses

Security books

Simons Institute Programs (with videos!)

Conferences

Systems conferences

Security and crypto conferences