Trusted Multi-Party Computation and Verifiable Simulations: A Scalable Blockchain Approach
This addresses the need for verifiable and trusted computational results in high-stakes domains like healthcare and policy-making, though it is incremental as it builds on existing blockchain and validation techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring trust in large-scale multi-party computations, such as epidemiological simulations, by proposing a blockchain-based framework with a lossy compression scheme to improve scalability, achieving reduced storage and communication costs.
Large-scale computational experiments, often running over weeks and over large datasets, are used extensively in fields such as epidemiology, meteorology, computational biology, and healthcare to understand phenomena, and design high-stakes policies affecting everyday health and economy. For instance, the OpenMalaria framework is a computationally-intensive simulation used by various non-governmental and governmental agencies to understand malarial disease spread and effectiveness of intervention strategies, and subsequently design healthcare policies. Given that such shared results form the basis of inferences drawn, technological solutions designed, and day-to-day policies drafted, it is essential that the computations are validated and trusted. In particular, in a multi-agent environment involving several independent computing agents, a notion of trust in results generated by peers is critical in facilitating transparency, accountability, and collaboration. Using a novel combination of distributed validation of atomic computation blocks and a blockchain-based immutable audits mechanism, this work proposes a universal framework for distributed trust in computations. In particular we address the scalaibility problem by reducing the storage and communication costs using a lossy compression scheme. This framework guarantees not only verifiability of final results, but also the validity of local computations, and its cost-benefit tradeoffs are studied using a synthetic example of training a neural network.