Distributing Trust in Critical Societal Scale Computing Infrastructure

• Main Author: Singanamalla, Sudheesh
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2024
• Subjects: Computer Engineering; Computer science; Information Technology
• ISBN: 9798383225240

Over the last decade, the world has seen an increase in the adoption of computing technology powered by the affordability of innovative mobile devices, exponential growth in access to the Internet, and cloud computing that allows organizations to easily scale their solutions worldwide. Computing is woven into the fabric of society and has begun to reshape it in unexpected ways. These societal changes have increased our reliance on hidden computing and networking infrastructure powering cloud, telecom, and Internet service providers (ISPs), making them critical societal scale computing infrastructure.Today, we increasingly trust a small number of infrastructure providers, who operate at nation-scale with an incredible amount of our data and private information. While this ongoing colocation resulted in economies of scale, it opened up tremendous abuse potential. Organizations providing critical services to citizens in a country could (1) maliciously misuse the data collected without consent, (2) be legally compelled to breach user privacy by governments, (3) be attacked by hackers in efforts to breach and sell user data, and (4) mis-configure services or face infrastructure failures which might appear as attacks – affecting customer trust, cause reputation and economic damages.While decentralization might be a tempting solution to address these challenges, it is difficult to achieve the scale, performance and ease of access of todays networks. My work presented in this dissertation focuses on scalable, and practical mechanisms in which users interacting with hidden infrastructure could gain privacy benefits keeping security unaffected through improved transparency, while maintaining comparable performance. This dissertation challenges the default trust settings in today’s computing infrastructure and proposes secure practical alternatives specifically to (1) democratize Internet access, (2) enable private, and verifiable communications with critical Internet services, and (3) reduce user’s trust requirements through improved transparency.