Cryptographic protocols with adaptive security ensure that security holds against an adver-sary who can dynamically determine which parties to corrupt as the protocol progresses—or even after the protocol is finished. In the setting where all parties may potentially be corrupted, and secure erasure is not assumed, it has been a long-standing open question to design secure-computation protocols with adaptive security running in constant rounds. Here, we show a constant-round, universally composable protocol for computing any functionality, tolerating a malicious, adaptive adversary corrupting any number of parties. Interest-ingly, our protocol can compute all functionalities, not just adaptively well-formed ones.
Cryptographic protocols with adaptive security ensure that security holds against an adver-sary who can dynamically determine which parties to corrupt as the protocol progresses—or even after the protocol is finished. In the setting where all parties may potentially be corrupted, and secure erasure is not assumed, it has been a long-standing open question to design secure-computation protocols with adaptive security running in constant rounds. Here, we show a constant-round, universally composable protocol for computing any functionality, tolerating a malicious, adaptive adversary corrupting any number of parties. Interest-ingly, our protocol can compute all functionalities, not just adaptively well-formed ones.
Secure multi-party computation (MPC) enables distrustful parties to jointly perform computations while guaranteeing both the privacy of their inputs and the correctness of the computation.
This thesis explores two aspects of secure multi-party computation: adaptive security and round efficiency. Adaptive security is concerned with an adversary that adaptively determines who and when to corrupt during the course of the computation. Even though this is a very natural and realistic assumption about the adversary, most of the MPC literature addresses security only against a static adversary — an adversary that chooses (and fixes) which parties to corrupt before the protocol starts executing. A protocol is called round-efficient if it runs in a small number of rounds. Constructing such protocols is important since efficiency of a protocol is greatly influenced by its round complexity.
The security in this thesis is formulated in the universal composability (UC) framework introduced by Canetti [Can01]. Protocols secure in the UC framework remain secure even when executed concurrently with other arbitrary protocols running in some larger network, and can be used as subroutines of larger protocols in a modular fashion. This property is important considering that nowadays many protocols are executed concurrently with others in the Internet.
With the focus on adaptive security and round efficiency, we obtain the following results:
(1) We show that with access to an ideal commitment functionality, there exists a protocol that UC realizes any well-formed multi-party functionality against a malicious, adaptive adversary that may corrupt any number of parties, with black-box access to any protocol that UC realizes oblivious transfer against a semi-honest, adaptive adversary.
(2) We show that there exists a protocol that UC realizes oblivious transfer against a semi-honest, adaptive adversary, with black-box access to a cryptographic primitive called a trapdoor simulatable cryptosystem, which is a natural relaxation of a simulatable cryptosystem introduced by Damgard and Nielsen [3N00].
We also show that the primitive can be constructed based on hardness of factoring.
(3) We present a single-message protocol that UC realizes two-party computing with encrypted data (a variant of secure two-party computation), based on the DDH assumption and non- interactive zero-knowledge arguments. The protocol achieves security against a malicious, static adversary.
(4) We present two round-efficient protocols that UC realize multi-party computing with encrypted data (a variant of secure multi-party computation), based on the DDH assumption and non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments. The first (resp. second) protocol requires one round (resp. two rounds) with appropriate preprocessing, which is independent of the exact circuit and actual inputs of the specific instance problem to solve — only the bound on the circuit size is known. Although the first protocol is more round-efficient, the preprocessing of the second is sometimes better under some efficiency considerations. Both protocols achieve security against a malicious, static adversary that may corrupt up to all but one parties.
We show how to securely realize any multi-party functionality in a universally composable way, regardless of the number of corrupted participants. That is, we consider a multi-party network with open communication and an adversary that can adaptively corrupt as many parties as it wishes. In this setting, our protocols allow any subset of the parties (with pairs of parties being a special case) to securely realize any desired functionality of their local inputs, and be guaranteed that security is preserved regardless of the activity in the rest of the network. This implies that security is preserved under concurrent composition of an unbounded number of protocol executions, it implies non-malleability with respect to arbitrary protocols, and more. Our constructions are in the common reference string model and make general intractability assumptions.
We show how to securely realize any multi-party functionality in a universally composable way, regardless of the number of corrupted participants. That is, we consider a multi-party network with open communication and an adversary that can adaptively corrupt as many parties as it wishes. In this setting, our protocols allow any subset of the parties (with pairs of parties being a special case) to securely realize any desired functionality of their local inputs, and be guaranteed that security is preserved regardless of the activity in the rest of the network. This implies that security is preserved under concurrent composition of an unbounded number of protocol executions, it implies non-malleability with respect to arbitrary protocols, and more. Our constructions are in the common reference string model and make general intractability assumptions.
In the setting of multiparty computation a set of parties with private inputs wish to compute some joint function of their inputs, whilst preserving certain security properties (like privacy and correctness). An adaptively secure protocol is one in which the security properties are preserved even if an adversary can adaptively and dynamically corrupt parties during a computation. This provides a high level of security, that is arguably necessary in today’s world of active computer break-ins. Until now, the work on adaptively secure multiparty computation has focused almost exclusively on the setting of an honest majority, and very few works have considered the honest minority and two-party cases. In addition, significant computational and communication costs are incurred by most protocols that achieve adaptive security. In this work, we consider the two-party setting and assume that honest parties may erase data. We show that in this model it is possible to securely compute any two-party functionality in the presence of adaptive semi-honest adversaries. Furthermore, our protocol remains secure under concurrent general composition (meaning that it remains secure irrespective of the other protocols running together with it). Our protocol is based on Yao’s garbled-circuit construction and, importantly, is as efficient as the analogous protocol for static corruptions. We argue that the model of adaptive corruptions with erasures has been unjustifiably neglected and that it deserves much more attention. 1
Adaptive security is a strong corruption model that captures "hacking" attacks where an external attacker breaks into parties' machines in the midst of a protocol execution. There are two types of adaptively-secure protocols: adaptive with erasures and adaptive without erasures. Achieving adaptivity without erasures is preferable, since secure erasures are not always trivial. However, it seems far harder. We introduce a new model of adaptive security called adaptive security with partial erasures that allows erasures, but only assumes them in a minimal sense. Specifically, if all parties are corrupted then security holds as long as any single party successfully erases. In addition, security holds if any proper subset of the parties is corrupted without erasures. We initiate a theoretical study of this new notion and demonstrate that secure computation in this setting is as efficient as static secure computation. In addition, we study the relations between semi-adaptive security [GWZ09], adaptive security with partial erasures, and adaptive security without any erasures. We prove that the existence of semi-adaptive OT implies secure computation in all these settings.
Yao's circuit garbling scheme is one of the basic building blocks of cryptographic protocol design. Originally designed to enable two-message, two-party secure computation, the scheme has been extended in many ways and has innumerable applications. Still, a basic question has remained open throughout the years: Can the scheme be extended to guarantee security in the face of an adversary that corrupts both parties, adaptively, as the computation proceeds? We answer this question in the affirmative. We define a new type of symmetric encryption, called functionally equivocal encryption (FEE), and show that when Yao's scheme is implemented with FEE as the underlying encryption mechanism, it becomes secure against such adaptive adversaries. We then show how to implement FEE from any one-way function. Combining our scheme with noncommitting encryption, we obtain the first two-message, two-party computation protocol, and the first constant-round multiparty computation protocol, in the plain model, that are secure against semihonest adversaries who can adaptively corrupt all parties. Using standard techniques, this protocol can be made standalone secure against malicious corruptions in the plain model and universal composability secure in the common random string model. Additional applications include the first fully leakage-tolerant general multiparty computation protocol (with preprocessing), as well as a public-key version of FEE which can serve as a replacement for noncommitting encryption with better efficiency than what is possible for the latter.