Vidur G.'s Senior Project Blog!

Currently, cryptography is mainly used for dealing with two trustworthy sources and defending against a malicious interceptor. However, if the sender and receiver turn out to be the actual untrustworthy parties, then how would that be defended against? I plan to conduct my research at Amazon.com, Inc. By learning and researching about mental poker, bit commitment, and oblivious transfer, I plan to create a demo model in which two parties can verify information and send it to each other with security and no interception, without requiring a middleman for verification. It is important to build a system in which two machines can interact with each other for a transaction and verify each other’s identities, without the need for relaying to a third-party or storing information on a router or such third machine. This system would make secure transactions directly, possibly eliminating a lot of factors in the internet routing map and use encryption to ensure safety of the data. Because the modern Internet is vastly open, it is hard to trust a server, and hence any normal cryptographic implementation will not succeed all the time, based on the nature of assuming the “middle-man” as trustworthy. By making such a model, we can create a decentralized web where all information goes from one computer to another while retaining safety and legitimacy.