IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
Perfectly-Secure Synchronous MPC With Asynchronous Fallback Guarantees
Ananya Appan, Anirudh Chandramouli, Ashish Choudhury
Abstract
Securemulti-party computation(MPC) is a fundamental problem in secure distributed computing. An MPC protocol allows a set of$n$mutually distrusting parties to carry out any joint computation of their private inputs, without disclosing any additional information about their inputs. MPC withinformation-theoreticsecurity (also calledunconditional security) provides the strongest security guarantees and remains secure even againstcomputationally unboundedadversaries.Perfectly-secureMPC protocols are a class of information-theoretically secure MPC protocols, which provide all the security guarantees in anerror-freefashion. The focus of this work is perfectly-secure MPC. Known protocols are designedassumingeither asynchronousorasynchronouscommunication network. It is well known that perfectly-securesynchronousMPC is possible as long as the adversary can corrupt any$t_{s} < n/3$parties. On the other hand, perfectly-secureasynchronousMPC protocols can tolerate up to$t_{a} < n/4$corrupt parties. A natural question is does there exist asingleMPC protocol for the setting where the parties arenot awareof the exact network type and which can tolerate up to$t_{s} < n/3$corruptions in a synchronous network and up to$t_{a} < n/4$corruptions in anasynchronousnetwork. We design such abest-of-both-worldsperfectly-secure MPC protocol, provided$3t_{s} + t_{a} < n$holds. For designing our protocol, we design two important building blocks which are of independent interest. The first building block is a best-of-both-worldsByzantine agreement(BA) protocol tolerating$t < n/3$corruptions which remains securebothin a synchronous as well as asynchronous network. The second building block is a polynomial-based best-of-both-worldsverifiable secret-sharing(VSS) protocol, which can tolerate up to$t_{s}$and$t_{a}$corruptions in asynchronousand in anasynchronousnetwork respectively.