A Proof of Security of Yao’s Protocol for Two-Party Computation

Ashish Choudhury, Arpita Patra

Thomas H. Schneider, Michael Zohner

Yehuda Lindell, Benny Pinkas B

In the mid 1980’s, Yao presented a constant-round protocol for securely computing any two-party functionality in the presence of semi-honest adversaries (FOCS 1986). In this paper, we provide a complete description of Yao’s protocol, along with a rigorous proof of security. Despite the importance of Yao’s protocol to the field of secure computation, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a proof of security has been published. 1

Yehuda Lindell, Benny Pinkas B

Abstract. We show an efficient secure two-party protocol, based on Yao’s construction, which provides security against malicious adversaries. Yao’s original protocol is only secure in the presence of semi-honest adversaries. Security against malicious adversaries can be obtained by applying the compiler of Goldreich, Micali and Wigderson (the “GMW compiler”). However, this approach does not seem to be very practical as it requires using generic zero-knowledge proofs. Our construction is based on applying cut-and-choose techniques to the original circuit and inputs. Security is proved according to the ideal/real simulation paradigm, and the proof is in the standard model (with no random oracle model or common reference string assumptions). The resulting protocol is computationally efficient: the only usage of asymmetric cryptography is for running O(1) oblivious transfers for each input bit (or for each bit of a statistical security parameter, whichever is larger). Our protocol combines techniques from folklore (like cut-and-choose) along with new techniques for efficiently proving consistency of inputs. We remark that a naive implementation of the cut-and-choose technique with Yao’s protocol does not yield a secure protocol. This is the first paper to show how to properly implement these techniques, and to provide a full proof of security. Our protocol can also be interpreted as a constant-round black-box reduction of secure two-party com-putation to oblivious transfer and perfectly-hiding commitments, or a black-box reduction of secure two-party computation to oblivious transfer alone, with a number of rounds which is linear in a sta-tistical security parameter. These two reductions are comparable to Kilian’s reduction, which uses OT alone but incurs a number of rounds which is linear in the depth of the circuit [18]. 1

Yehuda Lindell

Afshar, Arash

In this thesis we design and implement three approaches to provide efficient Secure Two- Party Computation (2PC) protocols that are secure in presence of malicious adversaries. The field of secure two-party computation enables two mutually distrusting parties, each with their own private input, to run a computation of an arbitrary program. At the end of the computation, nothing about their private input is leaked except for what can be learned from the output of the computation. The seminal work of Yao in 1986 provided the first proof that such a computation is feasible using the so called garbled circuits and given an Oblivious Transfer protocol. In this thesis, we follow Yao’s garbled circuit approach and focus on efficient protocols that are secure against malicious adversaries. We examine three different categories of optimization. In each category, we present a 2PC protocol, prove its security, and implement it as a proof of concept to demonstrate its running time in practice. Non-interactive Secure Computation: In this category, we offer the first implementation of a malicious 2PC protocol that reduces the required rounds of interaction between the two parties to only two rounds (i.e., each party sends only one message to the other party). Mixed Secure Two-Party Computation: In the second category we target big and complex programs and break them into subprograms. Then, we compute each subprogram using the most efficient 2PC protocol that is suitable for it. Finally, we securely connect these subprograms together. The goal is to reduce the overhead of the garbled circuits significantly, which results in a more efficient overall 2PC protocol for programs with specific properties. Secure Computation for Random Access Machine Programs: In the third category, we target programs that require random access to the memory (as opposed to a sequential access). We present the first efficient maliciously-secure protocol for computing such programs.