Abstract. We present the first general MPC protocol that satisfies the following: (1) the con-struction is black-box, (2) the protocol is universally composable in the plain model, and (3) the number of rounds is constant. The security of our protocol is proven in angel-based UC security under the assumption of the existence of one-way functions that are secure against sub-exponential-time adversaries and constant-round semi-honest oblivious transfer protocols that are secure against quasi-polynomial-time adversaries. We obtain the MPC protocol by constructing a constant-round CCA-secure commitment scheme in a black-box way under the assumption of the existence of one-way functions that are secure against sub-exponential-time adversaries. To justify the use of such a sub-exponential hardness assumption in obtaining our constant-round CCA-secure commitment scheme, we show that if black-box reductions are used, there does not exist any constant-round CCA-secure commitment scheme under any falsifiable polynomial-time hardness assumptions. 1
Abstract. We present the first general MPC protocol that satisfies the following: (1) the con-struction is black-box, (2) the protocol is universally composable in the plain model, and (3) the number of rounds is constant. The security of our protocol is proven in angel-based UC security under the assumption of the existence of one-way functions that are secure against sub-exponential-time adversaries and constant-round semi-honest oblivious transfer protocols that are secure against quasi-polynomial-time adversaries. We obtain the MPC protocol by constructing a constant-round CCA-secure commitment scheme in a black-box way under the assumption of the existence of one-way functions that are secure against sub-exponential-time adversaries. To justify the use of such a sub-exponential hardness assumption in obtaining our constant-round CCA-secure commitment scheme, we show that if black-box reductions are used, there does not exist any constant-round CCA-secure commitment scheme under any falsifiable polynomial-time hardness assumptions. 1
We present a round-efficient black-box construction of a general multi-party computation (MPC) protocol that satisfies composability in the plain model. The security of our protocol is proven in the angel-based UC framework [Prabhakaran and Sahai, STOC’04] under the minimal assumption of the existence of semi-honest oblivious transfer protocols. The round complexity of our protocol is max(O(log2n),O(ROT))
when the round complexity of the underlying oblivious transfer protocol is ROT
. Since constant-round semi-honest oblivious transfer protocols can be constructed under standard assumptions (such as the existence of enhanced trapdoor permutations), our result gives a O(log2n)
-round protocol under these assumptions. Previously, only an O(max(nϵ,ROT))
-round protocol was shown, where ϵ>0
is an arbitrary constant. We obtain our MPC protocol by constructing a O(log2n)
-round CCA-secure commitment scheme in a black-box way under the assumption of the existence of one-way functions.
We close the gap between black-box and non-black-box constructions of composable secure multiparty computation in the plain model under the minimal assumption of semi-honest oblivious transfer. The notion of protocol composition we target is angel-based security, or more precisely, security with super-polynomial helpers. In this notion, both the simulator and the adversary are given access to an oracle called an angel that can perform some predefined super-polynomial time task. Angel-based security maintains the attractive properties of the universal composition framework while providing meaningful security guarantees in complex environments without having to trust anyone. Angel-based security can be achieved using non-black-box constructions in max(R_OT,Õ(log n)) rounds where R_OT is the round-complexity of semi-honest oblivious transfer. However, current best known black-box constructions under the same assumption require max(R_OT,Õ(log² n)) rounds. If R_OT is a constant, the gap between non-black-box and black-box constructions can be a multiplicative factor log n. We close this gap by presenting a max(R_OT,Õ(log n)) round black-box construction. We achieve this result by constructing constant-round 1-1 CCA-secure commitments assuming only black-box access to one-way functions.
Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) allows a set of parties, each having its own private data, to compute a function of their joint data such that the parties only learn the output of this function and everything else about their data is hidden. MPC is a fundamental cryptographic abstraction that captures many other natural cryptographic primitives as special cases. It also has a wide range of practical applications such as conducting secure electronic auctions, delegating sensitive computation to untrusted cloud service providers, secure computation on genomic data and training machine learning models on private data.A long-standing open problem in this area is to construct MPC protocols that have {\\it optimal} (two-round) round complexity under the {\\it weakest} possible cryptographic hardness assumptions.We {\\it completely resolve} this problem by showing lower bounds and matching upper bounds on the hardness assumptions required for constructing round-optimal MPC. Specifically, we obtain the following results.\\begin{itemize}\\item \\textbf{Black-Box Separation.} We show that there exists no construction of two-round semi-honest MPC protocol for general functions that makes black-box use of a two-round oblivious transfer. As a corollary, a similar separation holds when starting with any 2-party functionality other than oblivious transfer. \\item \\textbf{Non-Black-Box Construction.} We show that the above negative result can be bypassed by making non-black-box use of a two-round oblivious transfer. Specifically, starting from a semi-honest (resp. malicious) secure two-round oblivious transfer protocol, we construct a two-round MPC protocol against semi-honest (resp. malicious) adversaries. \\end{itemize}Since any two-round MPC protocol for general functionalities implies a two-round oblivious transfer as a special case, the above two results show that non-black-box use of oblivious transfer is {\\it necessary and sufficient} to construct round-optimal MPC protocols.
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 consider the problem of constructing protocols for secure computation that achieve strong concurrent and composable notions of security in the plain model. Unfortunately UC-secure secure computation protocols are impossible in this setting, but the Angel-Based Composable Security notion offers a promising alternative. Until now, however, under standard (polynomialtime) assumptions, only protocols with polynomially many rounds were known to exist. In this work, we give the first Õ(log n)-round secure computation protocol in the plain model that achieves angel-based composable security in the concurrent setting, under standard assumptions. We do so by constructing the first Õ(log n)-round CCA-secure commitment protocol. Our CCA-secure commitment protocol is secure based on the minimal assumption that one-way functions exist. A central tool in obtaining our result is a new robust concurrent extraction lemma that we introduce and prove, based on the minimal assumptions that one-way functions exist. This robust concurrent extraction lemma shows how to build concurrent extraction procedures that work even in the context of an “external ” protocol that cannot be rewound by the extractor. We believe this lemma can be used to simplify many existing works on concurrent security, and is of independent interest. In fact, our lemma when used in conjunction with the concurrent-simulation schedule of Pass and Venkitasubramaniam (TCC’08), also yields a constant round construction based additionally on the existence of quasi-polynomial time (PQT) secure one-way functions. 1
We provide the first constant round constructions of non-malleable commitment and zero-knowledge protocols based only on one-way functions. This improves upon several previous (incomparable) works which required either: (a) super-constant number of rounds, or, (b) non-standard or sub-exponential hardness assumptions, or, (c) non-black-box simulation and collision resistant hash functions. These constructions also allow us to obtain the first constant round multi-party computation protocol relying only on the existence of constant round oblivious transfer protocols. Our primary technique can be seen as a means of implementing the previous “two-slot simulation ” idea in the area of non-malleability with only black-box simulation. A simple modification of our commitment scheme gives a construction which makes use of the underlying one-way function in a black-box way. The modified construction satisfies the notion of what we call nonmalleability w.r.t. replacement. Non-malleability w.r.t. replacement is a slightly weaker yet natural notion of non-malleability which we believe suffices for many application of non-malleable commitments. We show that a commitment scheme which is non-malleable only w.r.t. replacement is sufficient to obtain a (fully) black-box multi-party computation protocol. This allows us to obtain a constant round multi-party computation protocol making only a black-box use of the standard cryptographic primitives with polynomial-time hardness thus directly improving upon the recent work of Wee (FOCS’10). 0 1