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A General Multi-Party Protocol for Minimal Communication and Local Computation.

Johannes Schneider

Published Aug 31, 2015• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

A client wishes to outsource computation on confidential data to a network of servers. He does not trust a server on its own, but believes that servers do not collude. To solve this problem we introduce a new scheme called \emph{JOS} for perfect security in the context of secure multiparty computation in the semi-honest model that naturally requires at least three parties. It differs from classical work such as Yao, GMW, BGW or GRR through an explicit distinction of keys and encrypted values rather than having (equal) shares of a secret. Furthermore, JOS makes use of the distributive and associative nature of its encryption schemes and, at times, double encrypts values. Any Boolean circuit $C$ in disjunctive normal form with $w$ variables per clause can be evaluated in O($\log k$) rounds using messages of size O($2^{w-k}$) for an arbitrary parameter $k \in [2,w]$ and O($|C|\cdot 2^{w-k}$) bit operations. We allow for collusion of up to $n-2$ parties. On the theoretical side JOS improves a large body of work in one or several metrics. On the practical side, our local computation requirements improve on the run-time of GRR using Shamir's secret sharing up to several orders of magnitude.

Related papers

Secure Multi-Party Computation with a Helper

Johannes Schneider

A client wishes to outsource computation on confidential data to a network of parties. He does not trust a single party but believes that multiple parties do not collude. To solve this problem, we use the idea of treating one of the parties as a helper. A helper assists computation only. Often using more parties ensures confidentiality despite more corrupted parties. This does not hold for adding a helper. But a helper can in some cases lower the amount of communication asymptotically to the theoretical minimum of one bit per AND gate, improving significantly on schemes without a helper. It can also allow for very efficient computations of certain functions, as we show for the exponential function with public base.

arXiv:1508.07690•Aug 31, 2015•2 citations

On Protocol Security in the Cryptographic Model

Jesper Buus Nielsen, Jesper Buus Nielsen

It seems to be a generally acknowledged fact that you should never trust a computer and that you should trust the person operating the computer even less. This in particular becomes a problem when the party that you do not trust is one which is separated from you and is one on which you depend, e.g. because that party is the holder of some data or some capability that you need in order to operate correctly. How do you perform a given task involving interaction with other parties while allowing these parties a minimal influence on you and, if privacy is an issue, allowing them to learn as little about you as possible. This is the general problem of secure multiparty computation. The usual way of formalizing the problem is to say that a number of parties who do not trust each other wish to compute some function of their local inputs, while keeping their inputs as secret as possible and guaranteeing the correctness of the output. Both goals should be obtained even if some parties stop participating or some malevolent coalition of the parties start deviating arbitrarily from the agreed protocol. The task is further complicated by the fact that besides their mutual distrust, nor do the parties trust the channels by which they communicate. A general solution to the secure multiparty computation problem is a compiler which given any feasible function describes an efficient protocol which allows the parties to compute the function securely on their local inputs over an open network. Over the past twenty years the secure multiparty computation problem has been the subject of a large body of research, both research into the models of multiparty computation and research aimed at realizing general secure multiparty computation. The main approach to realizing secure multiparty computation has been based on verifiable secret sharing as computation, where each party holds a secret share of each input and during the execution computes secret shares of all intermediate values. This approach allows the parties to keep all inputs and intermediate values secret and to pool the shares of the output values to learn exactly these values. More recently an approach based on joint homomorphic encryption was introduced, allowing for an efficient realization of general multiparty computation secure against an eavesdropper. A joint encryption scheme is an encryption scheme where all parties can encrypt, but where it takes the participation of all parties to open an encryption. The computation then starts by all parties broadcasting encryptions of their inputs and progresses through computing encryptions of the intermediary values using the homomorphic properties of the encryption scheme. The encryptions of the outputs can then be jointly decrypted. In this dissertation we extend this approach by using threshold homomorphic encryption to provide full-fledged security against an active attacker which might control some of the parties and which might take over parties during the course of the protocol execution. As opposed to a joint encryption scheme a threshold encryption scheme only requires that a given number of the parties are operating correctly for decryption to be possible. In this dissertation we show that threshold homomorphic encryption allows to solve the secure general multiparty computation problem more efficiently than previous approaches to the problem. Starting from an open point-to-point network there is a long way to general secure multiparty computation. The dissertation contains contributions at several points along the way. In particular we investigate how to realize secure channels. We also show how threshold signature schemes can be used to efficiently realize a broadcast channel and how threshold cryptography can be used to provide the parties of the network with a source of shared randomness. All three tools are well-known to be extremely powerful resources in a network, and our principle contribution is to provide efficient realizations. The dissertation also contains contributions to the definitional part of the field of multiparty computation. Most significantly we augment the recent model of universally composable security with a formal notion of what it means for a protocol to only realize a given problem under a given restricted input-output behavior of the environment. This e.g. allows us to give the first specification of a universally composable zero-knowledge proof of membership which does not at the same time require the proof system to be a proof of knowledge.

•Jan 1, 2003•9 citations

High-Throughput Semi-Honest Secure Three-Party Computation with an Honest Majority

Toshinori Araki, Jun Furukawa, Yehuda Lindell +2 more

In this paper, we describe a new information-theoretic protocol (and a computationally-secure variant) for secure three-party computation with an honest majority. The protocol has very minimal computation and communication; for Boolean circuits, each party sends only a single bit for every AND gate (and nothing is sent for XOR gates). Our protocol is (simulation-based) secure in the presence of semi-honest adversaries, and achieves privacy in the client/server model in the presence of malicious adversaries. On a cluster of three 20-core servers with a 10Gbps connection, the implementation of our protocol carries out over 1.3 million AES computations per second, which involves processing over 7 billion gates per second. In addition, we developed a Kerberos extension that replaces the ticket-granting-ticket encryption on the Key Distribution Center (KDC) in MIT-Kerberos with our protocol, using keys/ passwords that are shared between the servers. This enables the use of Kerberos while protecting passwords. Our implementation is able to support a login storm of over 35,000 logins per second, which suffices even for very large organizations. Our work demonstrates that high-throughput secure computation is possible on standard hardware.

ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)•Oct 24, 2016•414 citations

Outsourcing Multi-Party Computation.

Seny Kamara, Payman Mohassel, Mariana Raykova

We initiate the study of secure multi-party computation (MPC) in a server-aided setting, where the parties have access to a single server that (1) does not have any input to the computation; (2) does not receive any output from the computation; but (3) has a vast (but bounded) amount of computational resources. In this setting, we are concerned with designing protocols that minimize the computation of the parties at the expense of the server. We develop new definitions of security for this server-aided setting that generalize the standard simulation-based definitions for MPC and allow us to formally capture the existence of dishonest but non-colluding participants. This requires us to introduce a formal characterization of non-colluding adversaries that may be of independent interest. We then design general and special-purpose server-aided MPC protocols that are more efficient (in terms of computation and communication) for the parties than the alternative of running a standard MPC protocol (i.e., without the server). Our main general-purpose protocol provides security when there is at least one honest party with input. We also construct a new and efficient server-aided protocol for private set intersection and give a general transformation from any secure delegated computation scheme to a server-aided two-party protocol. ∗Microsoft Research. senyk@microsoft.com. †University of Calgary. pmohassel@cspc.ucalgary.ca. Work done while visiting Microsoft Research. ‡Columbia University. mariana@cs.columbia.edu. Work done as an intern at Microsoft Research.

•May 1, 2011•179 citations

Optimizing Semi-Honest Secure Multiparty Computation for the Internet

Aner Ben-Efraim, Yehuda Lindell, Eran Omri

In the setting of secure multiparty computation, a set of parties with private inputs wish to compute some function of their inputs without revealing anything but their output. Over the last decade, the efficiency of secure two-party computation has advanced in leaps and bounds, with speedups of some orders of magnitude, making it fast enough to be of use in practice. In contrast, progress on the case of multiparty computation (with more than two parties) has been much slower, with very little work being done. Currently, the only implemented efficient multiparty protocol has many rounds of communication (linear in the depth of the circuit being computed) and thus is not suited for Internet-like settings where latency is not very low. In this paper, we construct highly efficient constant-round protocols for the setting of multiparty computation for semi-honest adversaries. Our protocols work by constructing a multiparty garbled circuit, as proposed in BMR (Beaver et al., STOC 1990). Our first protocol uses oblivious transfer and constitutes the first concretely-efficient constant-round multiparty protocol for the case of no honest majority. Our second protocol uses BGW, and is significantly more efficient than the FairplayMP protocol (Ben-David et al., CCS 2008) that also uses BGW.

ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)•Oct 24, 2016•92 citations

Secure and fair two-party computation

Mehmet Sabır Kiraz

Consider several parties that do not trust each other, yet they wish to correctly compute some common function of their local inputs while keeping these inputs private. This problem is known as "Secure Multi-Party Computation", and was introduced by Andrew Yao in 1982. Secure multi-party computations have some real world examples like electronic auctions, electronic voting or fingerprinting. In this thesis we consider the case where there are only two parties involved. This is known as "Secure Two-Party Computation". If there is a trusted third party called Carol, then the problem is pretty straightforward. The participating parties could hand their inputs in Carol who can compute the common function correctly and could return the outputs to the corresponding parties. The goal is to achieve (almost) the same result when there is no trusted third party. Cryptographic protocols are designed in order to solve these kinds of problems. These protocols are analyzed within an appropriate model in which the behavior of parties is structured. The basic level is called the Semi-Honest Model where parties are assumed to follow the protocol specification, but later can derive additional information based on the messages which have been received so far. A more realistic model is the so-called Malicious Model. The common approach is to first analyze a protocol in the semi-honest model and then later extend it into the malicious model. Any cryptographic protocol for secure two-party computation must satisfy the following security requirements: correctness, privacy and fairness. It must guarantee the correctness of the result while preserving the privacy of the parties’ inputs, even if one of the parties is malicious and behaves arbitrarily throughout the protocol. It must also guarantee fairness. This roughly means that whenever a party aborts the protocol prematurely, he or she should not have any advantage over the other party in discovering the output. The main question for researchers is to construct new protocols that achieve the above mentioned goals for secure multi-party computation. Of course, such protocols must be secure in a given model, as well as be as efficient as possible. In 1986, Yao presented the first general protocol for secure two-party computation which was applicable only to the semi-honest model. He uses a tool called "Garbled Circuit". Yao’s protocol uses the underlying primitives ("Pseudorandom Generator" and "Oblivious Transfer") as blackboxes which lead to efficient results. After Yao’s work many variants and improvements have been proposed for the malicious model. In this thesis, we design several new protocols for secure two-party computation based on Yao’s garbled circuit. Before we present the details of our new designs, we first show several weaknesses, security flaws or problems with the existing protocols in the literature. We first work in the semi-honest model and then extend it into the malicious model by presenting new protocols. Finally we add fairness to our protocol. Oblivious transfer (OT) is a fundamental primitive in modern cryptography which is useful for implementing protocols for secure multi-party computation. We study several variants of oblivious transfer in this thesis. We present a new protocol for the so-called "Committed OT". This protocol is very efficient in the sense that it is quite good in comparison to the most efficient committed OT protocols in the literature. The abovementioned flaw with the use of OT can be fixed with our committed oblivious transfer protocol. Furthermore, it is more general than all previous protocols, and, therefore, it is of independent interest. We also deal with fairness in this thesis. For protocols based on garbled circuit, so far only Benny Pinkas has presented a protocol in the literature for achieving fairness. We show a subtle problem with this protocol where the privacy of the inputs of one party can be compromised. We also describe this problem in detail which is in fact related to the fairness, and finally propose a more efficient scheme that does achieve fairness.

•Jan 1, 2007•19 citations
A client wishes to outsource computation on confidential data to a network of servers. He does not trust a server on its own, but believes that servers do not collude. To solve this problem we introduce a new scheme called \emph{JOS} for perfect security in the context of secure multiparty computation in the semi-honest model that naturally requires at least three parties. It differs from classical work such as Yao, GMW, BGW or GRR through an explicit distinction of keys and encrypted values rather than having (equal) shares of a secret. Furthermore, JOS makes use of the distributive and associative nature of its encryption schemes and, at times, double encrypts values. Any Boolean circuit CCC in disjunctive normal form with www variables per clause can be evaluated in O(log⁡k\log klogk) rounds using messages of size O(2w−k2^{w-k}2w−k) for an arbitrary parameter k∈[2,w]k \in [2,w]k∈[2,w] and O(∣C∣⋅2w−k|C|\cdot 2^{w-k}∣C∣⋅2w−k) bit operations. We allow for collusion of up to n−2n-2n−2 parties. On the theoretical side JOS improves a large body of work in one or several metrics. On the practical side, our local computation requirements improve on the run-time of GRR using Shamir's secret sharing up to several orders of magnitude.
A client wishes to outsource computation on confidential data to a network of parties. He does not trust a single party but believes that multiple parties do not collude. To solve this problem, we use the idea of treating one of the parties as a helper. A helper assists computation only. Often using more parties ensures confidentiality despite more corrupted parties. This does not hold for adding a helper. But a helper can in some cases lower the amount of communication asymptotically to the theoretical minimum of one bit per AND gate, improving significantly on schemes without a helper. It can also allow for very efficient computations of certain functions, as we show for the exponential function with public base.
It seems to be a generally acknowledged fact that you should never trust a computer and that you should trust the person operating the computer even less. This in particular becomes a problem when the party that you do not trust is one which is separated from you and is one on which you depend, e.g. because that party is the holder of some data or some capability that you need in order to operate correctly. How do you perform a given task involving interaction with other parties while allowing these parties a minimal influence on you and, if privacy is an issue, allowing them to learn as little about you as possible. This is the general problem of secure multiparty computation. The usual way of formalizing the problem is to say that a number of parties who do not trust each other wish to compute some function of their local inputs, while keeping their inputs as secret as possible and guaranteeing the correctness of the output. Both goals should be obtained even if some parties stop participating or some malevolent coalition of the parties start deviating arbitrarily from the agreed protocol. The task is further complicated by the fact that besides their mutual distrust, nor do the parties trust the channels by which they communicate. A general solution to the secure multiparty computation problem is a compiler which given any feasible function describes an efficient protocol which allows the parties to compute the function securely on their local inputs over an open network. Over the past twenty years the secure multiparty computation problem has been the subject of a large body of research, both research into the models of multiparty computation and research aimed at realizing general secure multiparty computation. The main approach to realizing secure multiparty computation has been based on verifiable secret sharing as computation, where each party holds a secret share of each input and during the execution computes secret shares of all intermediate values. This approach allows the parties to keep all inputs and intermediate values secret and to pool the shares of the output values to learn exactly these values. More recently an approach based on joint homomorphic encryption was introduced, allowing for an efficient realization of general multiparty computation secure against an eavesdropper. A joint encryption scheme is an encryption scheme where all parties can encrypt, but where it takes the participation of all parties to open an encryption. The computation then starts by all parties broadcasting encryptions of their inputs and progresses through computing encryptions of the intermediary values using the homomorphic properties of the encryption scheme. The encryptions of the outputs can then be jointly decrypted. In this dissertation we extend this approach by using threshold homomorphic encryption to provide full-fledged security against an active attacker which might control some of the parties and which might take over parties during the course of the protocol execution. As opposed to a joint encryption scheme a threshold encryption scheme only requires that a given number of the parties are operating correctly for decryption to be possible. In this dissertation we show that threshold homomorphic encryption allows to solve the secure general multiparty computation problem more efficiently than previous approaches to the problem. Starting from an open point-to-point network there is a long way to general secure multiparty computation. The dissertation contains contributions at several points along the way. In particular we investigate how to realize secure channels. We also show how threshold signature schemes can be used to efficiently realize a broadcast channel and how threshold cryptography can be used to provide the parties of the network with a source of shared randomness. All three tools are well-known to be extremely powerful resources in a network, and our principle contribution is to provide efficient realizations. The dissertation also contains contributions to the definitional part of the field of multiparty computation. Most significantly we augment the recent model of universally composable security with a formal notion of what it means for a protocol to only realize a given problem under a given restricted input-output behavior of the environment. This e.g. allows us to give the first specification of a universally composable zero-knowledge proof of membership which does not at the same time require the proof system to be a proof of knowledge.
In this paper, we describe a new information-theoretic protocol (and a computationally-secure variant) for secure three-party computation with an honest majority. The protocol has very minimal computation and communication; for Boolean circuits, each party sends only a single bit for every AND gate (and nothing is sent for XOR gates). Our protocol is (simulation-based) secure in the presence of semi-honest adversaries, and achieves privacy in the client/server model in the presence of malicious adversaries. On a cluster of three 20-core servers with a 10Gbps connection, the implementation of our protocol carries out over 1.3 million AES computations per second, which involves processing over 7 billion gates per second. In addition, we developed a Kerberos extension that replaces the ticket-granting-ticket encryption on the Key Distribution Center (KDC) in MIT-Kerberos with our protocol, using keys/ passwords that are shared between the servers. This enables the use of Kerberos while protecting passwords. Our implementation is able to support a login storm of over 35,000 logins per second, which suffices even for very large organizations. Our work demonstrates that high-throughput secure computation is possible on standard hardware.
We initiate the study of secure multi-party computation (MPC) in a server-aided setting, where the parties have access to a single server that (1) does not have any input to the computation; (2) does not receive any output from the computation; but (3) has a vast (but bounded) amount of computational resources. In this setting, we are concerned with designing protocols that minimize the computation of the parties at the expense of the server. We develop new definitions of security for this server-aided setting that generalize the standard simulation-based definitions for MPC and allow us to formally capture the existence of dishonest but non-colluding participants. This requires us to introduce a formal characterization of non-colluding adversaries that may be of independent interest. We then design general and special-purpose server-aided MPC protocols that are more efficient (in terms of computation and communication) for the parties than the alternative of running a standard MPC protocol (i.e., without the server). Our main general-purpose protocol provides security when there is at least one honest party with input. We also construct a new and efficient server-aided protocol for private set intersection and give a general transformation from any secure delegated computation scheme to a server-aided two-party protocol. ∗Microsoft Research. senyk@microsoft.com. †University of Calgary. pmohassel@cspc.ucalgary.ca. Work done while visiting Microsoft Research. ‡Columbia University. mariana@cs.columbia.edu. Work done as an intern at Microsoft Research.
In the setting of secure multiparty computation, a set of parties with private inputs wish to compute some function of their inputs without revealing anything but their output. Over the last decade, the efficiency of secure two-party computation has advanced in leaps and bounds, with speedups of some orders of magnitude, making it fast enough to be of use in practice. In contrast, progress on the case of multiparty computation (with more than two parties) has been much slower, with very little work being done. Currently, the only implemented efficient multiparty protocol has many rounds of communication (linear in the depth of the circuit being computed) and thus is not suited for Internet-like settings where latency is not very low. In this paper, we construct highly efficient constant-round protocols for the setting of multiparty computation for semi-honest adversaries. Our protocols work by constructing a multiparty garbled circuit, as proposed in BMR (Beaver et al., STOC 1990). Our first protocol uses oblivious transfer and constitutes the first concretely-efficient constant-round multiparty protocol for the case of no honest majority. Our second protocol uses BGW, and is significantly more efficient than the FairplayMP protocol (Ben-David et al., CCS 2008) that also uses BGW.
Consider several parties that do not trust each other, yet they wish to correctly compute some common function of their local inputs while keeping these inputs private. This problem is known as "Secure Multi-Party Computation", and was introduced by Andrew Yao in 1982. Secure multi-party computations have some real world examples like electronic auctions, electronic voting or fingerprinting. In this thesis we consider the case where there are only two parties involved. This is known as "Secure Two-Party Computation". If there is a trusted third party called Carol, then the problem is pretty straightforward. The participating parties could hand their inputs in Carol who can compute the common function correctly and could return the outputs to the corresponding parties. The goal is to achieve (almost) the same result when there is no trusted third party. Cryptographic protocols are designed in order to solve these kinds of problems. These protocols are analyzed within an appropriate model in which the behavior of parties is structured. The basic level is called the Semi-Honest Model where parties are assumed to follow the protocol specification, but later can derive additional information based on the messages which have been received so far. A more realistic model is the so-called Malicious Model. The common approach is to first analyze a protocol in the semi-honest model and then later extend it into the malicious model. Any cryptographic protocol for secure two-party computation must satisfy the following security requirements: correctness, privacy and fairness. It must guarantee the correctness of the result while preserving the privacy of the parties’ inputs, even if one of the parties is malicious and behaves arbitrarily throughout the protocol. It must also guarantee fairness. This roughly means that whenever a party aborts the protocol prematurely, he or she should not have any advantage over the other party in discovering the output. The main question for researchers is to construct new protocols that achieve the above mentioned goals for secure multi-party computation. Of course, such protocols must be secure in a given model, as well as be as efficient as possible. In 1986, Yao presented the first general protocol for secure two-party computation which was applicable only to the semi-honest model. He uses a tool called "Garbled Circuit". Yao’s protocol uses the underlying primitives ("Pseudorandom Generator" and "Oblivious Transfer") as blackboxes which lead to efficient results. After Yao’s work many variants and improvements have been proposed for the malicious model. In this thesis, we design several new protocols for secure two-party computation based on Yao’s garbled circuit. Before we present the details of our new designs, we first show several weaknesses, security flaws or problems with the existing protocols in the literature. We first work in the semi-honest model and then extend it into the malicious model by presenting new protocols. Finally we add fairness to our protocol. Oblivious transfer (OT) is a fundamental primitive in modern cryptography which is useful for implementing protocols for secure multi-party computation. We study several variants of oblivious transfer in this thesis. We present a new protocol for the so-called "Committed OT". This protocol is very efficient in the sense that it is quite good in comparison to the most efficient committed OT protocols in the literature. The abovementioned flaw with the use of OT can be fixed with our committed oblivious transfer protocol. Furthermore, it is more general than all previous protocols, and, therefore, it is of independent interest. We also deal with fairness in this thesis. For protocols based on garbled circuit, so far only Benny Pinkas has presented a protocol in the literature for achieving fairness. We show a subtle problem with this protocol where the privacy of the inputs of one party can be compromised. We also describe this problem in detail which is in fact related to the fairness, and finally propose a more efficient scheme that does achieve fairness.