UC Berkeley

Centralized systems are prone to data breaches, which may come from hackers and malicious or compromised employees inside the company. The scale and prevalence of such data breaches raise concerns from users, companies, and government agencies. In this dissertation, we study how to build systems that distribute centralized trust among many parties, such that the system remains secure as long as at least one of the parties is not compromised. We show how distributed trust can be used to secure systems for storage, machine learning, consensus, and authentication.