We introduce the notion of covert security with public verifiability, building on the covert security model introduced by Aumann and Lindell (TCC 2007). Protocols that satisfy covert security guarantee that the honest parties involved in the protocol will notice any cheating attempt with some constant probability . The idea behind the model is that the fear of being caught cheating will be enou...

We are building a system that harnesses the idle resources (cpu, storage, and bandwidth) of nodes (e.g., home desktops) distributed across the Internet to build useful distributed services like content distribution or remote backup. Users are compensated in return for contributing their nodes’ idle resources to the system. Collective managers bundle and manage the contributed resources and rese...