We introduce a new approach to multiparty computation (MPC) basing it on homomorphic threshold crypto-systems. We show that given keys for any sufficiently efficient system of this type, general MPC protocols for n players can be devised which are secure against an active adversary that corrupts any minority of the players. The total number of bits sent is O(nk|C|), where k is the security parameter and |C| is the size of a (Boolean) circuit computing the function to be securely evaluated. An earlier proposal by Franklin and Haber with the same complexity was only secure for passive adversaries, while all earlier protocols with active security had complexity at least quadratic in n. We give two examples of threshold cryptosystems that can support our construction and lead to the claimed complexities.
We propose a general multiparty computation protocol secure against an active adversary corrupting up to
n−1 of the n players. The protocol may be used to compute securely arithmetic circuits over any finite field
Fpk . Our protocol consists of a preprocessing phase that is both independent of the function to be computed and of the inputs, and a much more efficient online phase where the actual computation takes place. The online phase is unconditionally secure and has total computational (and communication) complexity linear in n, the number of players, where earlier work was quadratic in n. Moreover, the work done by each player is only a small constant factor larger than what one would need to compute the circuit in the clear. We show this is optimal for computation in large fields. In practice, for 3 players, a secure 64-bit multiplication can be done in 0.05 ms. Our preprocessing is based on a somewhat homomorphic cryptosystem. We extend a scheme by Brakerski et al., so that we can perform distributed decryption and handle many values in parallel in one ciphertext. The computational complexity of our preprocessing phase is dominated by the public-key operations, we need
O(n2/s) operations per secure multiplication where s is a parameter that increases with the security parameter of the cryptosystem. Earlier work in this model needed
Ω(n2) operations. In practice, the preprocessing prepares a secure 64-bit multiplication for 3 players in about 13 ms.
We put forward a new approach for the design of efficient multiparty protocols: 1. Design a protocol for a small number of parties (say, 3 or 4) which achieves security against a single corrupted party. Such protocols are typically easy to construct as they may employ techniques that do not scale well with the number of corrupted parties. 2. Recursively compose with itself to obtain an efficient n-party protocol which achieves security against a constant fraction of corrupted parties. The second step of our approach combines the player emulation technique of Hirt and Maurer (J. Cryptology, 2000) with constructions of logarithmic-depth formulae which compute threshold functions using only constant fan-in threshold gates. Using this approach, we simplify and improve on previous results in cryptography and distributed computing. In particular: - We provide conceptually simple constructions of efficient protocols for Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) in the presence of an honest majority, as well as broadcast protocols from point-to-point channels and a 2-cast primitive. - We obtain new results on MPC over blackbox groups and other algebraic structures. The above results rely on the following complexity-theoretic contributions, which may be of independent interest: - We show that for every integers j,k such that m = (k-1)/(j-1) is an integer, there is an explicit (poly(n)-time) construction of a logarithmic-depth formula which computes a good approximation of an (n/m)-out-of-n threshold function using only j-out-of-k threshold gates and no constants. - For the special case of n-bit majority from 3-bit majority gates, a non-explicit construction follows from the work of Valiant (J. Algorithms, 1984). For this special case, we provide an explicit construction with a better approximation than for the general threshold case, and also an exact explicit construction based on standard complexity-theoretic or cryptographic assumptions.
We put forward a new approach for the design of efficient multiparty protocols: 1. Design a protocol pi for a small number of parties (say, 3 or 4) which achieves security against a single corrupted party. Such protocols are typically easy to construct, as they may employ techniques that do not scale well with the number of corrupted parties. 2. Recursively compose pi with itself to obtain an efficient n-party protocol which achieves security against a constant fraction of corrupted parties. The second step of our approach combines the “player emulation ” technique of Hirt and Maurer (J. Cryptology, 2000) with constructions of logarithmic-depth formulae which compute threshold functions using only constant fan-in threshold gates. Using this approach, we simplify and improve on previous results in cryptogra-phy and distributed computing. In particular: • We provide conceptually simple constructions of efficient protocols for Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) in the presence of an honest majority, as well as broadcast protocols from point-to-point channels and a 2-cast primitive. • We obtain new results on MPC over blackbox groups and other algebraic structures. The above results rely on the following complexity-theoretic contributions, which may be of independent interest:
Abstract We construct the first actively-secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) protocols with an arbitrary number of parties in the dishonest majority setting, for an arbitrary field
F F with constant communication overhead over the “passive-GMW” protocol (Goldreich, Micali and Wigderson, STOC ‘87). Our protocols rely on passive implementations of Oblivious Transfer (OT) in the Boolean setting and Oblivious Linear function Evaluation (OLE) in the arithmetic setting. Previously, such protocols were only known over sufficiently large fields (Genkin et al. STOC ‘14) or a constant number of parties (Ishai et al. CRYPTO ‘08). Conceptually, our protocols are obtained via a new compiler from a passively-secure protocol for a distributed multiplication functionality
FMULT F MULT , to an actively-secure protocol for general functionalities. Roughly,
FMULT F MULT is parameterized by a linear-secret sharing scheme
S S , where it takes
S S -shares of two secrets and returns
S S -shares of their product. We show that our compilation is concretely efficient for sufficiently large fields, resulting in an overhead of 2 when securely computing natural circuits. Our compiler has two additional benefits: (1) It can rely on any passive implementation of
FMULT F MULT , which, besides the standard implementation based on OT (for Boolean) and OLE (for arithmetic), allows us to rely on implementations based on threshold cryptosystems (Cramer et al. Eurocrypt ‘01), and (2) it can rely on weaker-than-passive (i.e., imperfect/leaky) implementations, which in some parameter regimes yield actively-secure protocols with overhead less than 2. Instantiating this compiler with an “honest-majority” implementation of
FMULT F MULT , we obtain the first honest-majority protocol (with up to one-third corruptions) for Boolean circuits with constant communication overhead over the best passive protocol (Damgård and Nielsen, CRYPTO ‘07).
Abstract. Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) enables secure computation over the encrypted data of a single party. We explore how to extend this to multiple parties, using threshold fully homomorphic encryption (TFHE). In such scheme, the parties jointly generate a common FHE public key along with a secret key that is shared among them; they can later cooperatively decrypt ciphertexts without learning anything but the plaintext. We show how to instantiate this approach efficiently, by extending the recent FHE schemes of Brakerski, Gentry and Vaikuntanathan (CRYPTO ’11, FOCS ’11, ITCS ’12) based on the (ring) learning with errors assumption. Our main tool is to exploit the property that such schemes are additively homomorphic over their keys. Using TFHE, we construct simple multiparty computation protocols secure against fully malicious attackers, tolerating any number of corruptions, and providing security in the universal composability framework. Our protocols have the following properties: Low interaction: 3 rounds of interaction given a common random string, or 2 rounds with a public-key infrastructure. Low communication: independent of the function being computed (proportional to just input and output sizes). Cloud-assisted computation: the bulk of the computation can be efficiently outsourced to an external entity (e.g. a cloud service) so that the computation of all other parties is independent of the complexity of the evaluated function. 1