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Secure Computation Without Authentication.

Boaz Barak, Ran Canetti, Yehuda Lindell, Rafael Pass, Tal Rabin

Published Jan 1, 2007• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Abstract. In the setting of secure multiparty computation, a set of parties wish to jointly compute some function of their inputs. Such a computation must preserve certain security properties, like privacy and correctness, even if some of the participating parties or an external adversary collude to attack the honest parties. Until this paper, all protocols for general secure computation assumed that the parties can communicate reliably via authenticated channels. In this paper, we consider the feasibility of secure computation without any setup assumption. We consider a completely unauthenticated setting, where all messages sent by the parties may be tampered with and modified by the adversary (without the honest parties being able to detect this fact). In this model, it is not possible to achieve the same level of security as in the authenticated-channel setting. Nevertheless, we show that meaningful security guarantees can be provided. In particular, we define a relaxed notion of what it means to “securely compute ” a function in the unauthenticated setting. Then, we construct protocols for securely realizing any functionality in the stand-alone model, with no setup assumptions whatsoever. In addition, we construct universally composable protocols for securely realizing any functionality in the common reference string model (while still in an unauthenticated network). We also show that our protocols can be used to provide conceptually simple and unified solutions to a number of problems that were studied separately in the past, including password-based authenticated key exchange and non-malleable commitments. 1

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ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC)•May 22, 2005•45 citations
Abstract. In the setting of secure multiparty computation, a set of parties wish to jointly compute some function of their inputs. Such a computation must preserve certain security properties, like privacy and correctness, even if some of the participating parties or an external adversary collude to attack the honest parties. Until this paper, all protocols for general secure computation assumed that the parties can communicate reliably via authenticated channels. In this paper, we consider the feasibility of secure computation without any setup assumption. We consider a completely unauthenticated setting, where all messages sent by the parties may be tampered with and modified by the adversary (without the honest parties being able to detect this fact). In this model, it is not possible to achieve the same level of security as in the authenticated-channel setting. Nevertheless, we show that meaningful security guarantees can be provided. In particular, we define a relaxed notion of what it means to “securely compute ” a function in the unauthenticated setting. Then, we construct protocols for securely realizing any functionality in the stand-alone model, with no setup assumptions whatsoever. In addition, we construct universally composable protocols for securely realizing any functionality in the common reference string model (while still in an unauthenticated network). We also show that our protocols can be used to provide conceptually simple and unified solutions to a number of problems that were studied separately in the past, including password-based authenticated key exchange and non-malleable commitments. 1
In secure multi-party computation nnn parties jointly evaluate an nnn-variate function fff in the presence of an adversary which can corrupt up till ttt parties. Almost all the works that have appeared in the literature so far assume the presence of authenticated channels between the parties. This assumption is far from realistic. Two directions of research have been borne from relaxing this (strong) assumption: (a) The adversary is virtually omnipotent and can control all the communication channels in the network, (b) Only a partially connected topology of authenticated channels is guaranteed and adversary controls a subset of the communication channels in the network. This work introduces a new setting for (unconditional) secure multiparty computation problem which is an interesting intermediate model with respect to the above well studied models from the literature (by sharing a salient feature from both the above models). We consider the problem of (unconditional) secure multi-party computation when 'some' of the communication channels connecting the parties can be corrupted passively as well as actively. For this setting, some honest parties may be connected to several other honest parties via corrupted channels and may not be able to authentically communicate with them. Such parties may not be assured the canonical guarantees of correctness or privacy. We present refined definitions of security for this new intermediate model of unconditional multiparty computation. We show how to adapt protocols for (Unconditional) secure multiparty computation to realize the definitions and also argue the tightness of the results achieved by us.
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.
The notion of secure computation is central to cryptography. Introduced in the seminal works of Yao [FOCS'82, FOCS'86] and Goldreich, Micali and Wigderson [STOC'87], secure multiparty computation allows a group of (mutually) distrustful parties to jointly compute any functionality over their individual private inputs in such a manner that the honest parties obtain the correct outputs and no group of malicious parties learn anything beyond their inputs and the prescribed outputs. General feasibility results for secure computation were given by Yao [FOCS'86] and Goldreich et al. [STOC'87] more than two decades ago. Subsequent to these works, designing secure computation protocols that can tolerate more powerful adversaries and satisfy stronger notions of security has been a very active area of research. In this dissertation, we study two such new frontiers in the area of secure computation. In the first part of this dissertation, we initiate a study of designing leakage-resilient interactive protocols. Specifically, we consider the scenario where an adversary, in addition to corrupting a subset of parties, can leak (potentially via physical attacks) arbitrary information from the secret state of any honest party. This is in contrast to the standard notion of secure computation where it is assumed that the adversary only has black-box'' access to the honest parties. In particular, we formalize a meaningful definition of leakage-resilient zero knowledge proof systems and provide constructions that satisfy our notion. We also discuss various applications of our results. The second part of this dissertation concerns with the general question of whether it is possible to securely run cryptographic protocols over an insecure network environment such as the Internet. It is well-known that the standard notion of secure computation is only relevant to the stand-alone setting where a single protocol is being executed in isolation; as such it does not guarantee security when multiple protocol sessions may be executed concurrently under the control of an adversary who is present across all sessions. We consider the open problem of constructing secure password-based authenticated key exchange protocols in such a setting in the plain model (i.e., without assuming any trusted infrastructure or random oracles). We give the first construction of such a protocol based on standard cryptographic assumptions. Our results are in fact much more general, and extend to other functionalities w.r.t. a (necessarily) weakened notion of concurrently secure computation. The results presented in this dissertation stem from two papers which are joint works with Sanjam Garg and Amit Sahai, and with Vipul Goyal and Rafail Ostrovsky, respectively.
In the setting of secure multiparty computation, a set of mutually distrustful parties wish to jointly compute some function of their input (i.e., they wish to securely carry out some distributed task). %The joint computation should be such that even In the stand-alone case, it has been shown that every efficient function can be securely computed. However, in the setting of concurrent composition, broad impossibility results have been proven for the case where there is no honest majority (or trusted setup).In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of obtaining secure multiparty protocols in a network where certain time bounds are assumed. Specifically, the security of our protocols rely on the very reasonable assumption that local clocks do not "drift" too much (i.e., it is assumed that they proceed at approximately the same rate). We show that under this mild timing assumption, it is possible to securely compute any functionality under concurrent general composition (as long as messages from the arbitrary other protocols are delayed for a specified amount of time).