Abstract
While expensive cryptographically verifiable computation aims at defeating malicious agents, many civil purposes of outsourced computation tolerate a weaker notion of security, i.e., “lazy-but-honest” contractors. Targeting this type of agents, we develop optimal contracts for outsourcing of computational tasks via appropriate use of rewards, punishments, auditing rate, and “redundancy”. Our contracts provably minimize the expense of the outsourcer (principal) while guaranteeing correct computation. Furthermore, we incorporate practical restrictions of the maximum enforceable fine, limited and/or costly auditing, and bounded budget of the outsourcer. By examining the optimal contracts, we provide insights on how resources should be utilized when auditing capacity and enforceability are limited. Finally, we present a light-weight cryptographic implementation of the contracts to mitigate the double moral hazard problem between the principal and the agents.
The full version of this paper with formal proofs for all the propositions is accessible via https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/374.pdf.
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Pham, V., Khouzani, M.H.R., Cid, C. (2014). Optimal Contracts for Outsourced Computation. In: Poovendran, R., Saad, W. (eds) Decision and Game Theory for Security. GameSec 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8840. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12601-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12601-2_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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