MC2 Researchers Receive $1.2M NSF Grant for Verifiable Computation

Charalampos “Babis” Papamanthou, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering with appointments in UMIACS and the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2), was just awarded a $1.2 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to support the development of new methods for verifiable computation.

Verifiable computing refers to offloading the computation of some function—perhaps to the cloud—while still maintaining verifiable results.

“There is always a chance these outsourced computations might be performed incorrectly in the cloud, either due to implementation errors or malicious behavior,” says Papamanthou.

Papamanthou leads a research team that is building a novel architecture—called “Apollo”— that will be able to take large amounts of data and quickly perform verifiable computations without having to trust the cloud-computing infrastructure.

The team includes MC2 Director Jonathan Katz (computer science and UMIACS), Elaine Shi (computer science, MC2 and UMIACS), and Amol Deshpande (computer science and UMIACS).

“[Apollo] will combine innovations in programming languages, practical cryptography design and large-scale system implementation to bring the dream of practical verifiable computation to life” Papamanthou says.

The group has already started working on the project and the preliminary results are very encouraging, he adds.

The research results will be disseminated to a wide audience through publications and open-source implementations, and will be integrated into a UMD electrical and computer engineering graduate course on cloud computing security in the coming academic years.

To see a video overview of the work Papamanthou does in cybersecurity for cloud computing, go here.