Towards a Marketplace for Secure Outsourced Computations

This paper presents Kosto – a framework that provisions a marketplace for secure outsourced computations, wherein the pool of computing resources aggregates that which are offered by a large cohort of independent compute nodes. Kosto protects the confidentiality of clients’ inputs and the integrity of the outsourced computations using trusted hardware’s enclave execution (e.g., Intel SGX). Furthermore, Kosto mediates exchanges between the clients’ payments and the compute nodes’ work in servicing the clients’ requests without relying on a trusted third party. Empirical evaluation on the prototype implementation of Kosto shows that performance overhead incurred by enclave execution is as small as \(3\%\) for computation-intensive operations, and \(1.5{\times }\) for I/O-intensive operations.