Event
Ph.D. Dissertation Defense: Yupeng Zhang:
Thursday, June 28, 2018
10:00 a.m.
AVW 2168
Maria Hoo
301 405 3681
mch@umd.edu
ANNOUNCEMENT: Ph.D. Dissertation Defense
Name: Yupeng Zhang
Committee:
Professor Charalampos Papamanthou (Chair)
Professor Jonathan Katz
Professor Gang Qu
Professor Dana Dachman-Soled
Professor Larry Washington, Dean's Representative
Date/time: Thursday, June 28, 2018 at 10am
Location: AVW 2168
Title: New Zero-Knowledge Arguments Based on Interactive Proofs and Their Applications
Abstract:
We study the problem of zero-knowledge arguments, where a computationally weak verifier outsources the execution of a computation to a powerful but untrusted prover, while being able to validate that the result was computed correctly through a proof generated by the prover. In addition, the zero-knowledge property guarantees that the proof leaks no information about the potential secret input from the prover. Existing efficient schemes of zero-knowledge arguments require an expensive preprocessing phase that depends on a particular computation, and incur big overhead on the prover time and prover memory consumption.
This thesis proposes new constructions for zero-knowledge arguments that overcome the above problems. The new constructions require only a one time preprocessing and can be used to validate any computations later. They also reduce the overhead on the prover time and memory by orders of magnitude. We apply our new constructions to build a verifiable database system and verifiable RAM programs, leading to significant improvements upon prior work.
