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Communication-Efficient MPC for General Adversary Structures

Joshua Lampkins, Rafail Ostrovsky

Published Jan 1, 2013• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Abstract. A multiparty computation (MPC) protocol allows a set of players to compute a function of their inputs while keeping the inputs private and at the same time securing the correctness of the output. Most MPC protocols assume that the adversary can corrupt up to a fixed fraction of the number of players. Hirt and Maurer initiated the study of MPC under more general corruption patterns, in which the adversary is allowed to corrupt any set of players in some pre-defined collection of sets [6]. In this paper we consider this important direction of research and present significantly improved communication complexity of MPC protocols for general adversary structures. More specifically, ours is the first unconditionally secure protocol that achieves linear communication in the size of Monotone Span Program representing the adversary structure in the malicious setting against any Q2 adversary structure, whereas all previous protocols were at least cubic.

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MPC from General Linear Secret-Sharing Schemes

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Introduction In this chapter we will show how the protocols we have seen so far can be generalized to be based on general linear secret-sharing schemes. Doing this generalization has several advantages: first, it allows us to design protocols that protect against general adversary structures, a concept we explain later, and second, it allows us to consider protocols in which the field that is used in defining the secret-sharing scheme can be of size independent of the number of players. This turns out to be an advantage for the applications of multiparty computation (MPC) that we consider later but cannot be done for the protocols that we have seen so far: to use Shamir's scheme for n players based on polynomials as we have seen, the field must be of size at least n +1. For now, we will only consider the theory for linear secret sharing that we need to construct the protocols in this chapter. However, we note already that to get full mileage from the more general applications of secret sharing and MPC, we need additional theory, in particular, about the asymptotic behavior of secret-sharing schemes. This material can be found in Chapter 11. General Adversary Structures The corruption tolerance of the protocols that we have seen so far has been characterized by only a single number t , the maximal number of corruptions that can be tolerated. This is also known as the threshold-t model . One way to motivate this might be to think of corruption of a player as something that requires the adversary to invest some amount of resource, such as time or money. If the adversary has only bounded resources, there should be a limit on the corruptions he or she can do. However, characterizing this limit by only an upper bound implicitly assumes that all players are equally hard to corrupt. In reality, this may be completely false: some players may have much better security than others, so a more realistic model might be that the adversary can corrupt a small number of well-protected players or a large number of poorly protected players. However, the threshold model does not allow us to express this.

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Broadcast-Efficient Secure Multiparty Computation.

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Secure multiparty computation (MPC) is perhaps the most popular paradigm in the area of cryptographic protocols. It allows several mutually untrustworthy parties to jointly compute a function of their private inputs, without revealing to each other information about those inputs. In the case of unconditional (information-theoretic) security, protocols are known which tolerate a dishonest minority of players, who may coordinate their attack and deviate arbitrarily from the protocol specification. It is typically assumed in these results that parties are connected pairwise by authenticated, private channels, and that in addition they have access to a “broadcast ” channel. Broadcast allows one party to send a consistent message to all other parties, guaranteeing consistency even if the broadcaster is corrupted. Because broadcast cannot be simulated on the point-to-point network when more than a third of the parties are corrupt, it is impossible to construct general MPC protocols in this setting without using a broadcast channel (or some equivalent addition to the model). A great deal of research has focused on increasing the efficiency of MPC, primarily in terms of round complexity and communication complexity. In this work we propose a refinement of the round complexity which we term broadcast complexity. We view the broadcast channel as an expensive resource

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Abstract. Secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows a set P of n players to evaluate a function f in presence of an adversary who corrupts a subset of the players. In this paper we consider active, general adversaries, characterized by a so-called adversary structure Z which enumerates all possible subsets of corrupted players. In particular for small sets of players general adversaries better capture real-world requirements than classical threshold adversaries. Protocols for general adversaries are “efficient ” in the sense that they require |Z | O(1) bits of communication. However, as |Z | is usually very large (even exponential in n), the exact exponent is very relevant. In the setting with perfect security, the most efficient protocol known to date communicates O(|Z | 3) bits; we present a protocol for this setting which communicates O(|Z | 2) bits. In the setting with statistical security, O(|Z | 3) bits of communication is needed in general (whereas for a very restricted subclass of adversary structures, a protocol with communication O(|Z | 2) bits is known); we present a protocol for this setting (without limitations) which communicates O(|Z | 1) bits.

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Multiparty computation secure against continual memory leakage

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We construct a multiparty computation (MPC) protocol that is secure even if a malicious adversary, in addition to corrupting 1-ε fraction of all parties for an arbitrarily small constant ε >0, can leak information about the secret state of each honest party. This leakage can be continuous for an unbounded number of executions of the MPC protocol, computing different functions on the same or different set of inputs. We assume a (necessary) "leak-free" preprocessing stage. We emphasize that we achieve leakage resilience without weakening the security guarantee of classical MPC. Namely, an adversary who is given leakage on honest parties' states, is guaranteed to learn nothing beyond the input and output values of corrupted parties. This is in contrast with previous works on leakage in the multi-party protocol setting, which weaken the security notion, and only guarantee that a protocol which leaks l bits about the parties' secret states, yields at most l bits of leakage on the parties' private inputs. For some functions, such as voting, such leakage can be detrimental.

ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC)•May 19, 2012•55 citations

Measures of efficiency for secure multiparty computation

Rafail Ostrovsky, Clint Givens

Multiparty computation (MPC) is a powerful and generic cryptographic framework capable of realizing essentially any cryptographic task (functionality) while preserving privacy and robustness. In the MPC model, a group of mutually distrustful parties seek to jointly compute a function f of their privately held inputs x1, ..., xn, while revealing no information about those inputs beyond what is entailed by the function output(s). Some portion of these players may be corrupted, controlled by a centralized adversary who directs their (mis)behavior and seeks to gain information on private inputs or to disrupt the protocol execution. In this work, we examine the resource requirements of information-theoretically secure multiparty computation. In particular, we look at trade-offs involving what we call assumptions, by which we mean two aspects of the model's setup: (1) the extent to which parties are connected by secure, pairwise communication channels; and (2) the usage (as a black box) of a channel—a primitive which enforces consistency among views by allowing a single party to send a message to all other parties which is guaranteed to be consistent, even if the broadcaster is corrupted. Part I of this work focuses on the first network-model assumption, that of the graph's connectivity by pairwise channels. We show upper and lower bounds on communication complexity in the Secure Message Transmission with Public Discussion (SMT-PD) model, as a function of the threshold of corrupted parties. The SMT-PD model, which abstracts the problem of secure communication over a partially connected network, includes two components: a public and a set of simple channels. We show significant improvements in both areas: on the channel, we reduce communication to logarithmic in terms of the message's bit-length m, where the previous best result was linear in m; on the simple channels, we reduce from O(mn) to O(mn/(n−t)), where n is the number of simple channels and t is a bound on the number of corrupted channels. Using tools from information theory, we show this amount of simple-wire communication is essentially optimal. Finally, we give an amortized solution which drastically improves communication over channel when the protocol is repeated many times sequentially. Part II shifts focus to the second network-model assumption, the use of an atomic broadcast primitive. Here we show that three broadcast rounds suffice for general secure computation, while two broadcast rounds are necessary. In particular we show that even for the natural and important functionality of Weak Secret Sharing—a type of distributed commitment—there is no protocol which uses only a single broadcast and achieves better than an explicit constant probability of success (so the protocol's success cannot be a function of a security parameter).

•Jan 1, 2013•0 citations
Abstract. A multiparty computation (MPC) protocol allows a set of players to compute a function of their inputs while keeping the inputs private and at the same time securing the correctness of the output. Most MPC protocols assume that the adversary can corrupt up to a fixed fraction of the number of players. Hirt and Maurer initiated the study of MPC under more general corruption patterns, in which the adversary is allowed to corrupt any set of players in some pre-defined collection of sets [6]. In this paper we consider this important direction of research and present significantly improved communication complexity of MPC protocols for general adversary structures. More specifically, ours is the first unconditionally secure protocol that achieves linear communication in the size of Monotone Span Program representing the adversary structure in the malicious setting against any Q2 adversary structure, whereas all previous protocols were at least cubic.
Introduction In this chapter we will show how the protocols we have seen so far can be generalized to be based on general linear secret-sharing schemes. Doing this generalization has several advantages: first, it allows us to design protocols that protect against general adversary structures, a concept we explain later, and second, it allows us to consider protocols in which the field that is used in defining the secret-sharing scheme can be of size independent of the number of players. This turns out to be an advantage for the applications of multiparty computation (MPC) that we consider later but cannot be done for the protocols that we have seen so far: to use Shamir's scheme for n players based on polynomials as we have seen, the field must be of size at least n +1. For now, we will only consider the theory for linear secret sharing that we need to construct the protocols in this chapter. However, we note already that to get full mileage from the more general applications of secret sharing and MPC, we need additional theory, in particular, about the asymptotic behavior of secret-sharing schemes. This material can be found in Chapter 11. General Adversary Structures The corruption tolerance of the protocols that we have seen so far has been characterized by only a single number t , the maximal number of corruptions that can be tolerated. This is also known as the threshold-t model . One way to motivate this might be to think of corruption of a player as something that requires the adversary to invest some amount of resource, such as time or money. If the adversary has only bounded resources, there should be a limit on the corruptions he or she can do. However, characterizing this limit by only an upper bound implicitly assumes that all players are equally hard to corrupt. In reality, this may be completely false: some players may have much better security than others, so a more realistic model might be that the adversary can corrupt a small number of well-protected players or a large number of poorly protected players. However, the threshold model does not allow us to express this.
Secure multiparty computation (MPC) is perhaps the most popular paradigm in the area of cryptographic protocols. It allows several mutually untrustworthy parties to jointly compute a function of their private inputs, without revealing to each other information about those inputs. In the case of unconditional (information-theoretic) security, protocols are known which tolerate a dishonest minority of players, who may coordinate their attack and deviate arbitrarily from the protocol specification. It is typically assumed in these results that parties are connected pairwise by authenticated, private channels, and that in addition they have access to a “broadcast ” channel. Broadcast allows one party to send a consistent message to all other parties, guaranteeing consistency even if the broadcaster is corrupted. Because broadcast cannot be simulated on the point-to-point network when more than a third of the parties are corrupt, it is impossible to construct general MPC protocols in this setting without using a broadcast channel (or some equivalent addition to the model). A great deal of research has focused on increasing the efficiency of MPC, primarily in terms of round complexity and communication complexity. In this work we propose a refinement of the round complexity which we term broadcast complexity. We view the broadcast channel as an expensive resource
In this paper, we design secure multi-party computation (MPC) protocols in the asynchronous communication setting with optimal resilience. Our protocols are secure against a computationally-unbounded malicious adversary, characterized by an adversary structure Z\mathcal{Z}Z, which enumerates all possible subsets of potentially corrupt parties. Our protocols incur a communication of O(∣Z∣2)\mathcal{O}(|\mathcal{Z}|^2)O(∣Z∣2) and O(∣Z∣)\mathcal{O}(|\mathcal{Z}|)O(∣Z∣) bits per multiplication for perfect and statistical security respectively. These are the first protocols with this communication complexity, as such protocols were known only in the synchronous communication setting (Hirt and Tschudi, ASIACRYPT 2013).
Abstract. Secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows a set P of n players to evaluate a function f in presence of an adversary who corrupts a subset of the players. In this paper we consider active, general adversaries, characterized by a so-called adversary structure Z which enumerates all possible subsets of corrupted players. In particular for small sets of players general adversaries better capture real-world requirements than classical threshold adversaries. Protocols for general adversaries are “efficient ” in the sense that they require |Z | O(1) bits of communication. However, as |Z | is usually very large (even exponential in n), the exact exponent is very relevant. In the setting with perfect security, the most efficient protocol known to date communicates O(|Z | 3) bits; we present a protocol for this setting which communicates O(|Z | 2) bits. In the setting with statistical security, O(|Z | 3) bits of communication is needed in general (whereas for a very restricted subclass of adversary structures, a protocol with communication O(|Z | 2) bits is known); we present a protocol for this setting (without limitations) which communicates O(|Z | 1) bits.
We construct a multiparty computation (MPC) protocol that is secure even if a malicious adversary, in addition to corrupting 1-ε fraction of all parties for an arbitrarily small constant ε >0, can leak information about the secret state of each honest party. This leakage can be continuous for an unbounded number of executions of the MPC protocol, computing different functions on the same or different set of inputs. We assume a (necessary) "leak-free" preprocessing stage. We emphasize that we achieve leakage resilience without weakening the security guarantee of classical MPC. Namely, an adversary who is given leakage on honest parties' states, is guaranteed to learn nothing beyond the input and output values of corrupted parties. This is in contrast with previous works on leakage in the multi-party protocol setting, which weaken the security notion, and only guarantee that a protocol which leaks l bits about the parties' secret states, yields at most l bits of leakage on the parties' private inputs. For some functions, such as voting, such leakage can be detrimental.
Multiparty computation (MPC) is a powerful and generic cryptographic framework capable of realizing essentially any cryptographic task (functionality) while preserving privacy and robustness. In the MPC model, a group of mutually distrustful parties seek to jointly compute a function f of their privately held inputs x1, ..., xn, while revealing no information about those inputs beyond what is entailed by the function output(s). Some portion of these players may be corrupted, controlled by a centralized adversary who directs their (mis)behavior and seeks to gain information on private inputs or to disrupt the protocol execution. In this work, we examine the resource requirements of information-theoretically secure multiparty computation. In particular, we look at trade-offs involving what we call assumptions, by which we mean two aspects of the model's setup: (1) the extent to which parties are connected by secure, pairwise communication channels; and (2) the usage (as a black box) of a channel—a primitive which enforces consistency among views by allowing a single party to send a message to all other parties which is guaranteed to be consistent, even if the broadcaster is corrupted. Part I of this work focuses on the first network-model assumption, that of the graph's connectivity by pairwise channels. We show upper and lower bounds on communication complexity in the Secure Message Transmission with Public Discussion (SMT-PD) model, as a function of the threshold of corrupted parties. The SMT-PD model, which abstracts the problem of secure communication over a partially connected network, includes two components: a public and a set of simple channels. We show significant improvements in both areas: on the channel, we reduce communication to logarithmic in terms of the message's bit-length m, where the previous best result was linear in m; on the simple channels, we reduce from O(mn) to O(mn/(n−t)), where n is the number of simple channels and t is a bound on the number of corrupted channels. Using tools from information theory, we show this amount of simple-wire communication is essentially optimal. Finally, we give an amortized solution which drastically improves communication over channel when the protocol is repeated many times sequentially. Part II shifts focus to the second network-model assumption, the use of an atomic broadcast primitive. Here we show that three broadcast rounds suffice for general secure computation, while two broadcast rounds are necessary. In particular we show that even for the natural and important functionality of Weak Secret Sharing—a type of distributed commitment—there is no protocol which uses only a single broadcast and achieves better than an explicit constant probability of success (so the protocol's success cannot be a function of a security parameter).