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IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P)

SHARK: Actively Secure Inference Using Function Secret Sharing

Kanav Gupta, Nishanth Chandran, Divya Gupta, Jonathan I. Katz, Rahul Sharma

Published May 12, 2025• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We consider the problem of actively secure two-party machine-learning inference in the preprocessing model, where the parties obtain (input-independent) correlated randomness in an offline phase that they can then use to run an efficient protocol in the (input-dependent) online phase. In this setting, the state-of-the-art is the work of Escudero et al. (Crypto 2020); unfortunately, that protocol requires a large amount of correlated randomness, extensive communication, and many rounds of interaction, which leads to poor performance. In this work, we show protocols for this setting based on function secret sharing (FSS) that beat the state-of-the-art in all parameters: they use less correlated randomness and fewer rounds, and require lower communication and computation. We achieve this in part by allowing for a mix of boolean and arithmetic values in FSS-based protocols (something not done in prior work), as well as by relying on “interactive FSS;’ a generalization of FSS we introduce. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach we build SHARK-the first FSS-based system for actively secure inference-which outperforms the state-of-the-art by up to 2300×.

DOI
10.1109/sp61157.2025.00175

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We consider the problem of actively secure two-party machine-learning inference in the preprocessing model, where the parties obtain (input-independent) correlated randomness in an offline phase that they can then use to run an efficient protocol in the (input-dependent) online phase. In this setting, the state-of-the-art is the work of Escudero et al. (Crypto 2020); unfortunately, that protocol requires a large amount of correlated randomness, extensive communication, and many rounds of interaction, which leads to poor performance. In this work, we show protocols for this setting based on function secret sharing (FSS) that beat the state-of-the-art in all parameters: they use less correlated randomness and fewer rounds, and require lower communication and computation. We achieve this in part by allowing for a mix of boolean and arithmetic values in FSS-based protocols (something not done in prior work), as well as by relying on “interactive FSS;’ a generalization of FSS we introduce. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach we build SHARK-the first FSS-based system for actively secure inference-which outperforms the state-of-the-art by up to 2300×.
In this work, we consider the problem of secure multi-party computation (MPC) with n parties where at most t are under the control of a computationally bounded adversary given the constraint t < n/2. We aim to design a round efficient protocol by minimizing the number of rounds in which the broadcast primitive is involved. In this setting, the previous best protocol can be attributed to Katz-Koo (EUROCRYPT 2007) which is set in the offline-online paradigm (where the parties generate preprocessing data during the offline phase to lighten the computation in the online phase). Their online phase is a constant round protocol with no invocations of broadcast, while the offline phase protocol needs total 29 rounds with a broadcast invocation in one round. Our work improves the round complexity of their offline phase protocol, by running in 4 rounds, with only a single broadcast round. Additionally, we also improve the communication complexity of the offline phase protocol by a factor of Ω(n3). As a technical contribution, we present the first two round computationally-secure verifiable secret-sharing (VSS) scheme that invokes broadcast in only one round.
We consider the problem of securely generating useful instances of two-party correlations, such as many independent copies of a random oblivious transfer (OT) correlation, using a small amount of communication. This problem is motivated by the goal of secure computation with silent preprocessing, where a low-communication input-independent setup, followed by local ("silent") computation, enables a lightweight "non-cryptographic" online phase once the inputs are known. Recent works of Boyle et al. (CCS 2018, Crypto 2019) achieve this goal with good concrete efficiency for useful kinds of two-party correlations, including OT correlations, under different variants of the Learning Parity with Noise (LPN) assumption, and using a small number of "base'' oblivious transfers. The protocols of Boyle et al. have several limitations. First, they require a large number of communication rounds. Second, they are only secure against semi-honest parties. Finally, their concrete efficiency estimates are not backed by an actual implementation. In this work we address these limitations, making three main contributions: Eliminating interaction. Under the same assumption, we obtain the first concretely efficient 2-round protocols for generating useful correlations, including OT correlations, in the semi-honest security model. This implies the first efficient 2-round OT extension protocol of any kind and, more generally, protocols for non-interactive secure computation (NISC) that are concretely efficient and have the silent preprocessing feature. Malicious security. We provide security against malicious parties without additional interaction and with only a modest overhead; prior to our work, no similar protocols were known with any number of rounds. Implementation. Finally, we implemented, optimized, and benchmarked our 2-round OT extension protocol, demonstrating that it offers a more attractive alternative to the OT extension protocol of Ishai et al. (Crypto 2003) in many realistic settings.
Nowadays, computation becomes more advanced, and may require more than one parties to participate.Some examples include e-voting system and privacy-preserving data analytics.One of the main concerns here is privacy.Inputs of these systems must be kept secret.To address this concern, we can construct the systems by using secure multi-party protocols, where several parties with their secret inputs perform joint computations in oblivious ways.Many aspects of the protocols can be further improved towards the usage in reallife applications, considering operational requirements and trade-offs.These operational requirements include efficiency, functionality, security, scalability, and verifiability.This thesis consists of three parts; each part focuses on specific improvements.In the first part, we focus on improving security and efficiency.We consider a homomorphic secret sharing scheme, where a secret input from each party is divided into several shares, each share is sent to different computing server, and the servers can perform some computation locally to get shares of the result.It is obvious that homomorphic secret sharing schemes can be used as secure multi-party protocols with small communication.We found that the existing homomorphic secret sharing scheme with public key of Lai et al. (Asiacrypt 2018) is 1-secure, which means if more than one computing servers try to collude, the security of the system will be compromised.They also proposed a t-secure scheme, but it requires solving NP-hard problem.To improve their security level, we use the idea from the secret sharing scheme of Ito et al.Our scheme also supports any number of computing servers without solving NP-hard problem.Using hyper-graph representation of non-access structures, we prove the maximum polynomial degree that our scheme can support.In addition, we prove correctness and security of the scheme, and propose some possible further improvements.In the second part, we focus on improving scalability and efficiency.Most of the secret sharing schemes, including homomorphic secret sharing, require the number of parties to be fixed in advance.This causes an inconvenience if we want to add more parties later in order to change the security setting or improve availability of the system.One existing variant of secret sharing, called evolving secret sharing, allows any number of parties to join the system at any time.However, it is inefficient to perform computation on this kind of secret sharing.To address this problem, we propose the definition of evolving homomorphic secret sharing, which combines evolving and homomorphic properties together.The scheme iii then supports unbounded number of parties, and allows local computation on shares.In addition to the definition, we propose two concrete schemes.The first scheme realizes evolving disjunctive hierarchical access structure supporting multiplication.The second scheme realizes evolving partially disjunctive hierarchical access structure supporting lowdegree polynomial computation.In the third part, we focus on improving functionality, verifiability, and efficiency.We consider the problem of oblivious deterministic finite automata (DFA) evaluation protocol.In this problem, one party holds a secret string, and the other party holds a secret pattern.The goal of this protocol is to output whether the string matches with the pattern of not without revealing both secret inputs.Most of the existing protocols use several communication rounds and require public key primitives, which can be inefficient.As our contribution, we propose an oblivious conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS) scheme for DFA.It is the first CDS scheme that has a functionality of DFA evaluation.We then use the proposed oblivious CDS scheme as a building block to construct an oblivious DFA evaluation protocol, using a multi-client verifiable computation framework.As a result, our protocol is constant-round, verifiable, and does not require any public key primitives.We also propose a standard CDS scheme for DFA as an independent interest.This thesis is expected to be a step of secure multi-party protocols and secret sharing schemes enhancements towards real-life applications.High level ideas for more improvements are also suggested as future prospects.
Machine learning algorithms crucially depend on non-linear mathematical functions such as division (for normalization), exponentiation (for softmax and sigmoid), tanh (as an activation function), logarithm (for crossentropy loss), and square root (for back-propagation of normalization layers). However, when machine learning is performed over secure computation, these protocols incur a large communication overhead and high round complexity. In this work, we propose new multi-party computation (MPC) protocols for such functions. Our protocols achieve constant round complexity (3 for semi-honest, 4 for malicious), an order of magnitude lower communication (54 − 121× lower than prior art), and high concrete efficiency (2−1163× faster runtime). We rely on recent advances in function secret sharing (FSS) to construct these protocols. Our contributions can be summarized as follows: (1) A constant round protocol to securely evaluate nonlinear functions such as division, exponentiation, logarithm, and tanh (in comparison to prior art which uses round complexity proportional to the rounds of iterative methods/required precision) with high accuracy. This construction largely follows prior work in look-up style secure computation. (2) Our main contribution is the extension of the above protocol to be secure in the presence of malicious adversaries in the honest majority setting. We provide a malicious sketching protocol for FSS schemes that works over rings and in order to prove its security, we extend (and prove) a corresponding form of SchwartzZippel lemma over rings. This is the first such extension of the lemma and it can be of independent interest in other domains of secure computation. (3) We implement our protocol and showcase order of magnitude improvements in runtime and communication. Given the low round complexity and substantially lower communication, our protocols achieve even better performance over network constrained environments such as WAN. Finally, we showcase how such functions can lead to scalability in machine learning. Note that techniques presented are applicable beyond the application of machine learning as the protocols effectively present an efficient 1-out-of-N oblivious transfer or an efficient private information retrieval protocol.
Multi-point function secret sharing (FSS) is a building block for pseudo-random correlation generators used in novel silent correlation generation methods for various secure multi-party computation applications. However, the main construction used so far is the naive approach to combining several point functions. In this paper, we propose an efficient and natural generalisation of the point function FSS scheme of Boyle et al. 2016 using a tree structure, a pseudorandom generator and systems of linear equations. We propose a new notion of distributed random multi-point function. Our construction splits the distributed multi-point function scheme into a random multi-point function scheme and an algorithm to transform a random output into the desired output value. The resulting scheme, which we call SLAMP-FSS, improves upon the state of the art in terms of calls to a pseudorandom generator (PRG).
Function secret sharing (FSS) is a cryptographic primitive that is introduced by Boyle et al. (Eurocrypt 2015), motivated by application scenarios involving private access to large distributed data while minimising the overhead of communication, for example, private information retrieval. Informally, an n-party FSS scheme splits a function f into n functions f1,...,fnsuch that f = f1+...+ fnand every strict subset of the function shares hide f . Most of the known FSS constructions only have computational hiding, namely, the hiding property holds only against a computationally bounded adversary. We consider information-theoretic hiding in this work while allowing f to be recovered from t function shares and correspondingly, any (t - 1) function shares unconditionally hide f . Call it (t, n)-threshold function secret sharing ((t, n)-TFSS for short). Using information-theoretic tools and through a series of optimizations, we show that our (t, n)-TFSS have better performance than FSS in terms of communication complexity, a criterion that measures the efficiency of such protocols. Specifically, a (t, n)-TFSS scheme with communication complexity O(l) is designed in this paper and it is better than the existing FSS schemes with lowest communication complexity O(λl), where λ is the length of pseudo-random generator's seeds. In addition, the (t, n)-TFSS have an extra robustness property in the sense that even if up to (n - t) function shares are not available, the protocol still computes the function value at a given point correctly.