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ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)

Amortizing Secure Computation with Penalties

Ranjit Kumaresan, Iddo Bentov

Published Oct 24, 2016• 65 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Motivated by the impossibility of achieving fairness in secure computation [Cleve, STOC 1986], recent works study a model of fairness in which an adversarial party that aborts on receiving output is forced to pay a mutually predefined monetary penalty to every other party that did not receive the output. These works show how to design protocols for secure computation with penalties that guarantees that either fairness is guaranteed or that each honest party obtains a monetary penalty from the adversary. Protocols for this task are typically designed in an hybrid model where parties have access to a "claim-or-refund" transaction functionality denote FCR*.

DOI
10.1145/2976749.2978424

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It is known that Bitcoin enables to achieve fairness in secure computation by imposing a monetary penalty on adversarial parties. This functionality is called secure computation with penalties. Bentov and Kumaresan (Crypto 2014) showed that it could be realized with O(n) rounds and O(n) broadcasts for any function, where n is the number of parties. Kumaresan and Bentov (CCS 2014) posed an open question: "Is it possible to design secure computation with penalties that needs only O(1) rounds and O(n) broadcasts?" In this work, we introduce secure computation with non-equivalent penalties, and design a protocol achieving this functionality with O(1) rounds and O(n) broadcasts only. The new functionality is the same as secure computation with penalties except that every honest party receives more than a predetermined amount of compensation while the previous one requires that every honest party receives the same amount of compensation. In particular, both are the same if all parties behave honestly. Thus, our result gives a partial answer to the open problem with a slight and natural modification of functionality.

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In the setting of secure multiparty computation, a set of mutually distrustful parties wish to securely compute some joint function of their private inputs. The computation should be carried out in a secure way, meaning that the properties privacy, correctness, independence of inputs, fairness and guaranteed output delivery should all be preserved. Unfortunately, in the case of no honest majority – and specifically in the important two-party case – it is impossible to achieve fairness and guaranteed output delivery. In this paper, we show how a legal infrastructure that respects digital signatures can be used to enforce fairness in two-party computation. Our protocol has the property that if one party obtains output while the other does not (meaning that fairness is breached), then the party not obtaining output has a digitally signed cheque from the other party. Thus, fairness can be “enforced ” in the sense that any breach results in a loss of money by the adversarial party. 1

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Two settings are typically considered for secure multipartycomputation, depending on whether or not a majority of the partiesare assumed to be honest. Protocols designed under this assumptionprovide "full security" (and, in particular, guarantee outputdelivery and fairness) when this assumption is correct; however, if half or more of the parties are dishonest then security iscompletely compromised. On the other hand, protocols toleratingarbitrarily-many faults do not provide fairness or guaranteed output delivery even if only a single party is dishonest. It isnatural to wonder whether it is possible to achieve the "best ofboth worlds" : namely, a single protocol that simultaneouslyachieves the best possible security in both the above settings. Ishai, et al. (Crypto 2006) recently addressed this question, andruled out constant-round protocols of this type.

ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC)•Jun 11, 2007•75 citations
Motivated by the impossibility of achieving fairness in secure computation [Cleve, STOC 1986], recent works study a model of fairness in which an adversarial party that aborts on receiving output is forced to pay a mutually predefined monetary penalty to every other party that did not receive the output. These works show how to design protocols for secure computation with penalties that guarantees that either fairness is guaranteed or that each honest party obtains a monetary penalty from the adversary. Protocols for this task are typically designed in an hybrid model where parties have access to a "claim-or-refund" transaction functionality denote FCR*.
It is known that Bitcoin enables to achieve fairness in secure computation by imposing a monetary penalty on adversarial parties. This functionality is called secure computation with penalties. Bentov and Kumaresan (Crypto 2014) showed that it could be realized with O(n) rounds and O(n) broadcasts for any function, where n is the number of parties. Kumaresan and Bentov (CCS 2014) posed an open question: "Is it possible to design secure computation with penalties that needs only O(1) rounds and O(n) broadcasts?" In this work, we introduce secure computation with non-equivalent penalties, and design a protocol achieving this functionality with O(1) rounds and O(n) broadcasts only. The new functionality is the same as secure computation with penalties except that every honest party receives more than a predetermined amount of compensation while the previous one requires that every honest party receives the same amount of compensation. In particular, both are the same if all parties behave honestly. Thus, our result gives a partial answer to the open problem with a slight and natural modification of functionality.
Abstract Fairness is a security notion of secure computation and cannot always be achieved if an adversary corrupts a majority of parties in standard settings. Lindell (CT-RSA 2008) showed that imposing a monetary penalty on an adversary can circumvent the impossibility. He formalized such a security notion as “legally enforceable fairness" for the two-party setting based on the ideal trusted bank functionality and showed a protocol achieving the requirements. Based on the same framework, we introduce secure multi-party computation with legally enforceable fairness that is applicable for an arbitrary number of parties. Further, we propose two protocols that realize our introduced functionality. The first one achieves O(n) rounds and O(nα)O(n \alpha )O(nα) O ( n α ) fees, where n is the number of parties, and α\alpha α α is a parameter for the penalty amount. The fee refers to the balance amount in the bank required at the beginning of the protocol, which evaluates the difficulty of participating in the protocol in a financial sense. The second one achieves O(1) rounds and O(n2α)O(n^2 \alpha )O(n2α) O ( n 2 α ) fees.
Secure computation is a fundamental problem in modern cryptography in which multiple parties join to compute a function of their private inputs without revealing anything beyond the output of the function. A series of very strong results in the 1980’s demonstrated that any polynomial-time function can be computed while guaranteeing essentially every desired security property. The only exception is the fairness property, which states that no player should receive their output from the computation unless all players receive their output. While it was shown that fairness can be achieved whenever a majority of players are honest, it was also shown that fairness is impossible to achieve in general when half or more of the players are dishonest. Indeed, it was proven that even boolean XOR cannot be computed fairly by two parties. The fairness property is both natural and important, and as such it was one of the first questions addressed in modern cryptography (in the context of signature exchange). One contribution of this thesis is to survey the many approaches that have been used to guarantee different notions of partial fairness. We then revisit the topic of fairness within a modern security framework for secure computation. We demonstrate that, despite the strong impossibility result mentioned above, certain interesting functions can be computed fairly, even when half (or more) of the parties are malicious. We also provide a new notion of partial fairness, demonstrate feasibility of achieving this notion for a large class of functions, and show impossibility for certain functions outside this class. We consider fairness in the presence of rational adversaries, and, finally, we study the difficulty of achieving fairness by exploring how much external help is necessary for providing fair secure computation.
In the setting of secure multiparty computation, a set of mutually distrustful parties wish to securely compute some joint function of their private inputs. The computation should be carried out in a secure way, meaning that the properties privacy, correctness, independence of inputs, fairness and guaranteed output delivery should all be preserved. Unfortunately, in the case of no honest majority – and specifically in the important two-party case – it is impossible to achieve fairness and guaranteed output delivery. In this paper, we show how a legal infrastructure that respects digital signatures can be used to enforce fairness in two-party computation. Our protocol has the property that if one party obtains output while the other does not (meaning that fairness is breached), then the party not obtaining output has a digitally signed cheque from the other party. Thus, fairness can be “enforced ” in the sense that any breach results in a loss of money by the adversarial party. 1
Two settings are typically considered for secure multipartycomputation, depending on whether or not a majority of the partiesare assumed to be honest. Protocols designed under this assumptionprovide "full security" (and, in particular, guarantee outputdelivery and fairness) when this assumption is correct; however, if half or more of the parties are dishonest then security iscompletely compromised. On the other hand, protocols toleratingarbitrarily-many faults do not provide fairness or guaranteed output delivery even if only a single party is dishonest. It isnatural to wonder whether it is possible to achieve the "best ofboth worlds" : namely, a single protocol that simultaneouslyachieves the best possible security in both the above settings. Ishai, et al. (Crypto 2006) recently addressed this question, andruled out constant-round protocols of this type.