A secure integer comparison protocol is one of the most fundamental building blocks to construct protocols of rich functionality in multi-party computation. It allows parties to compute the less-than functionality on shared values in privacy preserving manner. In this paper, we present a tree-based secure two-party comparison protocol in the client-aided client-server model, which outperforms existing approaches in terms of round complexity when it is used for 64-bit data. Our proposed protocol requires only 9 communication rounds to compare 64-bit data, which is at least 3 times fewer rounds than existing protocols. This suggests that our protocol is adequate to be used in low-latency networks such as WAN.
A secure integer comparison protocol is one of the most fundamental building blocks to construct protocols of rich functionality in multi-party computation. It allows parties to compute the less-than functionality on shared values in privacy preserving manner. In this paper, we present a tree-based secure two-party comparison protocol in the client-aided client-server model, which outperforms existing approaches in terms of round complexity when it is used for 64-bit data. Our proposed protocol requires only 9 communication rounds to compare 64-bit data, which is at least 3 times fewer rounds than existing protocols. This suggests that our protocol is adequate to be used in low-latency networks such as WAN.
We present an improved constant-round secure two-party protocol for integer comparison functionality, which is one of the most fundamental building blocks in secure computation. Our protocol is in the so-called client-server model, which is utilized in real-world MPC products such as Sharemind, where any number of clients can create shares of their input and distribute to the servers who then jointly compute over the shares and return the shares of the result to the client. In the client-aided client-server model, as mentioned briefly by Mohassel and Zhang (S&P'17), a client further generates and distributes some necessary correlated randomness to servers. Such correlated randomness admits efficient protocols since otherwise, servers have to jointly generate randomness by themselves, which can be inefficient. In this paper, we improve the state-of-the-art constant-round comparison protocols by Damgå rd et al. (TCC'06) and Nishide and Ohta (PKC'07) in the client-aided model. Our techniques include identifying correlated randomness in these comparison protocols. Along the way, we also use tree-based techniques for a building block, which deviate from the above two works. Our proposed protocol requires only 5 communication rounds, regardless of the bit length of inputs. This is at least 5 times fewer rounds than existing protocols. We implement our secure comparison protocol in C++. Our experimental results show that this low-round complexity benefits in high-latency networks such as WAN. We also present secure Min/Argmin protocols using the secure comparison protocol.
Secure two-party comparison plays a crucial role in many privacy-preserving applications, such as privacy-preserving data mining and machine learning. In particular, the available comparison protocols with the appropriate input/output configuration have a significant impact on the performance of these applications. In this paper, we firstly describe a taxonomy of secure two-party comparison protocols which allows us to describe the different configurations used for these protocols in a systematic manner. This taxonomy leads to a total of 216 types of comparison protocols. We then describe conversions among these types. While these conversions are based on known techniques and have explicitly or implicitly been considered previously, we show that a combination of these conversion techniques can be used to convert a perhaps less-known two-party comparison protocol by Nergiz et al. (IEEE SocialCom 2010) into a very efficient protocol in a configuration where the two parties hold shares of the values being compared, and obtain a share of the comparison result. This setting is often used in multi-party computation protocols, and hence in many privacy-preserving applications as well. We furthermore implement the protocol and measure its performance. Our measurement suggests that the protocol outperforms the previously proposed protocols for this input/output configuration, when off-line pre-computation is not permitted.
Secure two-party comparison plays a crucial role in many privacy-preserving applications, such as privacy-preserving data mining and machine learning. In particular, the available comparison protocols with the appropriate input/output configuration have a significant impact on the performance of these applications. In this paper, we firstly describe a taxonomy of secure two-party comparison protocols which allows us to describe the different configurations used for these protocols in a systematic manner. This taxonomy leads to a total of 216 types of comparison protocols.We then describe conversions among these types. While these conversions are based on known techniques and have explicitly or implicitly been considered previously, we show that a combination of these conversion techniques can be used to convert a perhaps less-known two-party comparison protocol by Nergiz et al. (IEEE SocialCom 2010) into a very efficient protocol in a configuration where the two parties hold shares of the values being compared, and obtain a share of the comparison result. This setting is often used in multi-party computation protocols, and hence in many privacy-preserving applications as well. We furthermore implement the protocol and measure its performance. Our measurement suggests that the protocol outperforms the previously proposed protocols for this input/output configuration, when off-line pre-computation is not permitted.
Integer division is one of the most fundamental arithmetic operators and is ubiquitously used. However, the existing division protocols in secure multi-party computation (MPC) are inefficient and very complex, and this has been a barrier to applications of MPC such as secure machine learning. We already have some secure division protocols working in ℤ2n. However, these existing results have drawbacks that those protocols needed many communication rounds and needed to use bigger integers than in/output. In this paper, we improve a secure division protocol in two ways. First, we construct a new protocol using only the same size integers as in/output. Second, we build efficient constant-round building blocks used as subprotocols in the division protocol. With these two improvements, communication rounds of our division protocol are reduced to about 36% (87 rounds → 31 rounds) for 64-bit integers in comparison with the most efficient previous one.
In this paper we are interested in efficient and secure constant round multi-party protocols which provide unconditional security against so called honest-but-curious adversaries. In particular, we design a novel constant round protocol that converts from shares over Z_q to shares over the integers working for all shared inputs from Z_q. Furthermore, we present a constant round protocol to securely evaluate a shared input on a public polynomial whose running time is linear in the degree of the polynomial. The proposed solution makes use of Chebyshev Polynomials. We show that the latter two protocols can be used to design efficient constant round protocols for the following natural problems: (i) Equality: Computing shares of the bit indicating if a shared input value equals zero or not. This provides the missing building blocks for many constant round linear algebra protocols from the work of Cramer and Damgård [CD01]. (ii) Comparison: Computing shares of a bit indicating which of two shared inputs is greater. (iii) Bits: Computing shares of the binary representation of a shared input value. (iv) Exponentiation: Computing shares of x^a mod q given shares of x, a and q. Prior to this paper, for all the above mentioned problems, there were in general no efficient constant round protocols known providing unconditional security.
Secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows a set of parties to compute a function jointly while keeping their inputs private. Compared with the MPC based on garbled circuits, some recent research results show that MPC based on secret sharing (SS) works at a very high speed. Moreover, SS-based MPC can be easily vectorized and achieve higher throughput. In SS-based MPC, however, we need many communication rounds for computing concrete protocols like equality check, less-than comparison, etc. This property is not suited for large-latency environments like the Internet (or WAN). In this paper, we construct semi-honest secure communication-efficient two-party protocols. The core technique is Beaver triple extension, which is a new tool for treating multi-fan-in gates, and we also show how to use it efficiently. We mainly focus on reducing the number of communication rounds, and our protocols also succeed in reducing the number of communication bits (in most cases). As an example, we propose a less-than comparison protocol (under practical parameters) with three communication rounds. This is less than a half compared with the previous work. Moreover, the number of communication bits is also 38.4% fewer. As a result, total online execution time is 56.1% shorter than the previous work adopting the same settings. Although the computation costs of our protocols are more expensive than those of previous work, we confirm via experiments that such a disadvantage has small effects on the whole online performance in the typical WAN environments.