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Black Box Separations for Differentially Private Protocols.

Dakshita Khurana, Hemanta K. Maji, Amit Sahai

Published Jan 1, 2014• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

We study the maximal achievable accuracy of distributed differentially private protocols for a large natural class of boolean functions, in the computational setting. In the information theoretic model, McGregor et al. [FOCS 2010] and Goyal et al. [CRYPTO 2013] have demonstrated several functionalities whose differentially private computation results in much lower accuracies in the distributed setting, as compared to the client-server setting. We explore lower bounds on the computational assumptions under which this particular accuracy gap can possibly be reduced for general two-party boolean output functions. In the distributed setting, it is possible to achieve optimal accuracy, i.e. the maximal achievable accu-racy in the client-server setting, for any function, if a semi-honest secure protocol for oblivious transfer exists. However, we show the following strong impossibility results: ◦ For any boolean function and fixed level of privacy, the maximal achievable accuracy of any (fully) black-box construction based on existence of key-agreement protocols is at least a constant smaller than optimal achievable accuracy. Since key-agreement protocols imply the existence of one-way functions, this separation also extends to one-way functions.

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Conference on Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science•Jan 12, 2014•10 citations
We study the maximal achievable accuracy of distributed differentially private protocols for a large natural class of boolean functions, in the computational setting. In the information theoretic model, McGregor et al. [FOCS 2010] and Goyal et al. [CRYPTO 2013] have demonstrated several functionalities whose differentially private computation results in much lower accuracies in the distributed setting, as compared to the client-server setting. We explore lower bounds on the computational assumptions under which this particular accuracy gap can possibly be reduced for general two-party boolean output functions. In the distributed setting, it is possible to achieve optimal accuracy, i.e. the maximal achievable accu-racy in the client-server setting, for any function, if a semi-honest secure protocol for oblivious transfer exists. However, we show the following strong impossibility results: ◦ For any boolean function and fixed level of privacy, the maximal achievable accuracy of any (fully) black-box construction based on existence of key-agreement protocols is at least a constant smaller than optimal achievable accuracy. Since key-agreement protocols imply the existence of one-way functions, this separation also extends to one-way functions.
We study the cryptographic complexity of two-party differentially-private protocols for a large natural class of boolean functionalities. Information theoretically, McGregor et al. [FOCS 2010] and Goyal et al. [Crypto 2013] demonstrated several functionalities for which the maximal possible accuracy in the distributed setting is significantly lower than that in the client-server setting. Goyal et al. [Crypto 2013] further showed that "highly accurate" protocols in the distributed setting for any non-trivial functionality in fact imply the existence of one-way functions. However, it has remained an open problem to characterize the exact cryptographic complexity of this class. In particular, we know that semi-honest oblivious transfer helps obtain optimally accurate distributed differential privacy. But we do not know whether the reverse is true. We study the following question: Does the existence of optimally accurate distributed differentially private protocols for any class of functionalities imply the existence of oblivious transfer (or equivalently secure multi-party computation)? We resolve this question in the affirmative for the class of boolean functionalities that contain an XOR embedded on adjacent inputs. We give a reduction from oblivious transfer to: - Any distributed optimally accurate epsilon-differentially private protocol with epsilon > 0 computing a functionality with a boolean XOR embedded on adjacent inputs. - Any distributed non-optimally accurate epsilon-differentially private protocol with epsilon > 0, for a constant range of non-optimal accuracies and constant range of values of epsilon, computing a functionality with a boolean XOR embedded on adjacent inputs. Enroute to proving these results, we demonstrate a connection between optimally-accurate twoparty differentially-private protocols for functions with a boolean XOR embedded on adjacent inputs, and noisy channels, which were shown by Crépeau and Kilian [FOCS 1988] to be sufficient for oblivious transfer.
In this paper, we study the question of whether or not it is possible to construct protocols for general secure computation in the setting of malicious adversaries and no honest majority that use the underlying primitive (e.g., enhanced trapdoor permutation) in a black-box way only. Until now, all known general constructions for this setting were inherently non-blackbox since they required the parties to prove zero-knowledge statements that are related to the computation of the underlying primitive. Our main technical result is a fully black-box reduction from oblivious transfer with security against malicious parties to oblivious transfer with security against semi-honest parties. As a corollary, we obtain the first constructions of general multiparty protocols (with security against malicious adversaries and without an honest majority) which only make a black-box use of semi-honest oblivious transfer, or alternatively a black-box use of lower-level primitives such as enhanced trapdoor permutations or homomorphic encryption. In order to construct this reduction we introduce a new notion of security called privacy in the presence of defensible adversaries. This notion states that if an adversary can produce (retroactively, after the protocol terminates) an input and random tape that make
Secure multi-party computation allows mutually distrusting parties to compute securely over their private data. However, even in the semi-honest two-party setting, most interesting functions cannot be computed securely in the information-theoretic plain model. Intuitively, the objective of accurately evaluating the output of such functions is inherently inimical to the privacy concerns of the parties. Securely evaluating OR of the input bits of two parties is the simplest example, and captures the essence of the hardness in securely evaluating most functions. This work studies the interplay between accuracy and privacy of secure 2-party function evaluation in the information-theoretic plain model. We provide an optimal accuracy versus privacy tradeoff for computing OR(x, y), where x and y are, respectively, the private input bits of Alice and Bob. In particular, we construct a round-optimal two-party protocol for OR that has maximum semi-honest security in the information-theoretic plain model. Prior results exhibit only weak tradeoffs that are far from the optimal. We generalize our techniques to obtain a tight accuracy-versus-privacy tradeoff characterization for a stronger notion of security, namely differentially-private semi-honest security. The technical heart of our result is a new technique to derive inequalities for distributions of transcripts generated by protocols. This approach reduces the domain of the optimization problem from an unbounded number of transcripts to a constant size while preserving the optimal solution to the original problem. We believe that these techniques for analyzing protocols in the information-theoretic plain model will be of independent interest.
We define the notions of reducibility and completeness in multi-party private computations. Let g be an n-argument function. We say that a function f is reducible to g if n honest-but-curious players can compute the function f n-privately, given a black-box for g (for which they secretly give inputs and get the result of operating g on these inputs). We say that g is complete (for multi-party private computations) if every function f is reducible to g. In this paper, we characterize the complete Boolean functions: we show that a Boolean function g is complete if and only if g itself cannot be computed n-privately (when there is no black-box available). Namely, for Boolean functions, the notions of completeness and n-privacy are complementary. This characterization gives a huge collection of complete functions (any non-private Boolean function!) compared to very few examples given (implicitly) in previous work. On the other hand, for non-Boolean functions, we show that these two notions are not complementary. Our results can be viewed as a generalization (for multi-party protocols and for (n/spl ges/2)-argument functions) of the two-party case, where it was known that Oblivious Transfer protocol (and its variants) are complete.>
We prove two classes of lower bounds on the communication complexity of information-theoretically secure multiparty computation. The first lower bound applies to perfect passive secure multiparty computation in the standard model with n = 2t+1 parties of which t are corrupted. We show a lower bound that applies to secure evaluation of any function, assuming that each party can choose to learn or not learn the output. Specifically, we show that there is a function H^* such that for any protocol that evaluates y_i = b_i ⋅ f(x₁,...,x_n) with perfect passive security (where b_i is a private boolean input), the total communication must be at least 1/2 ∑_{i = 1}ⁿ H_f^*(x_i) bits of information. The second lower bound applies to the perfect maliciously secure setting with n = 3t+1 parties. We show that for any n and all large enough S, there exists a reactive functionality F_S taking an S-bit string as input (and with short output) such that any protocol implementing F_S with perfect malicious security must communicate Ω(nS) bits. Since the functionalities we study can be implemented with linear size circuits, the result can equivalently be stated as follows: for any n and all large enough g ∈ ℕ there exists a reactive functionality F_C doing computation specified by a Boolean circuit C with g gates, where any perfectly secure protocol implementing F_C must communicate Ω(n g) bits. The results easily extends to constructing similar functionalities defined over any fixed finite field. Using known techniques, we also show an upper bound that matches the lower bound up to a constant factor (existing upper bounds are a factor lg n off for Boolean circuits). Both results also extend to the case where the threshold t is suboptimal. Namely if n = kt+s the bound is weakened by a factor O(s), which corresponds to known optimizations via packed secret-sharing.
The seminal result of Impagliazzo and Rudich (STOC 1989) gave a black-box separation between one-way functions and public-key encryption: a public-key encryption scheme cannot be constructed using one-way functions in a black-box way. In addition, their result implied black-box separations between one-way functions and protocols for certain Secure Function Evaluation (SFE) functionalities (in particular, Oblivious Transfer). Surprisingly, however, since then there has been no further progress in separating one-way functions and SFE functionalities. In this work, we present the complete picture for finite deterministic 2-party SFE functionalities, vis a vis one-way functions. We show that in case of semi-honest adversaries, one-way functions are black-box separated from all such SFE functionalities, except the ones which have unconditionally secure protocols (and hence do not rely on any computational hardness). In the case of active adversaries, a black-box one-way function is indeed useful for SFE, but we show that it is useful only as much as access to an ideal commitment functionality is useful.