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International Conference on Security and Cryptography

Honorific Security: Efficient Two-Party Computation with Offloaded Arbitration and Public Verifiability

Tianxiang Dai, Yufan Jiang, Yong Li, Jörn Müller‐Quade, Andy Rupp

Published Jan 1, 2025• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In the secure two-party computation (2PC), an adversary is often categorized as semi-honest or malicious, depending on whether it follows the protocol specifications. Covert security (Aumann and Lindell, 2010) first looks into the “middle ground”, such that an active adversary who cheats will be caught with a predefined probability. Other security notions, such as publicly auditable security (Baum et al., 2014) and (robust) accountability family (Küsters et al., 2010; Graf et al., 2023; Rivinius et al., 2022), achieve public verifiability as a stronger security guarantee by relying on heavy offline and online constructions with zero knowledge proofs and (or) a bulletin board functionality. In this work, we propose a new security notion called honorific security, where an external arbiter can identify the cheater without a bulletin board. Specifically, we delay and outsource the verification steps to the arbiter, so that the original online computation is thus accelerated. We show that a maliciously secure garbled circuit (GC) (Yao, 1986) protocol can be constructed with only slightly more overhead than a passively secure protocol. Our construction performs up to 2.37 times and 13.30 times as fast as the state-of-the-art protocols with covert and malicious security, respectively.

DOI
10.5220/0013456200003979

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In the secure two-party computation (2PC), an adversary is often categorized as semi-honest or malicious, depending on whether it follows the protocol specifications. Covert security (Aumann and Lindell, 2010) first looks into the “middle ground”, such that an active adversary who cheats will be caught with a predefined probability. Other security notions, such as publicly auditable security (Baum et al., 2014) and (robust) accountability family (Küsters et al., 2010; Graf et al., 2023; Rivinius et al., 2022), achieve public verifiability as a stronger security guarantee by relying on heavy offline and online constructions with zero knowledge proofs and (or) a bulletin board functionality. In this work, we propose a new security notion called honorific security, where an external arbiter can identify the cheater without a bulletin board. Specifically, we delay and outsource the verification steps to the arbiter, so that the original online computation is thus accelerated. We show that a maliciously secure garbled circuit (GC) (Yao, 1986) protocol can be constructed with only slightly more overhead than a passively secure protocol. Our construction performs up to 2.37 times and 13.30 times as fast as the state-of-the-art protocols with covert and malicious security, respectively.
We introduce the notion of covert security with public verifiability, building on the covert security model introduced by Aumann and Lindell (TCC 2007). Protocols that satisfy covert security guarantee that the honest parties involved in the protocol will notice any cheating attempt with some constant probability ɛ. The idea behind the model is that the fear of being caught cheating will be enough of a deterrent to prevent any cheating attempt. However, in the basic covert security model, the honest parties are not able to persuade any third party (say, a judge) that a cheating occurred. We propose (and formally define) an extension of the model where, when an honest party detects cheating, it also receives a certificate that can be published and used to persuade other parties, without revealing any information about the honest party’s input. In addition, malicious parties cannot create fake certificates in the attempt of framing innocents. Finally, we construct a secure two-party computation protocol for any functionality f that satisfies our definition, and our protocol is almost as efficient as the one of Aumann and Lindell. We believe that the fear of a public humiliation or even legal consequences vastly exceeds the
Multiparty computation protocols (MPC) are said to be secure against covert adversaries if the honest parties are guaranteed to detect any misbehavior by the malicious parties with a constant probability. Protocols that, upon detecting a cheating attempt, additionally allow the honest parties to compute certificates, which enable third parties to be convinced of the malicious behavior of the accused parties, are called publicly verifiable. In this work, we make several contributions to the domain of MPC with security against covert adversaries. We identify a subtle flaw in a protocol of Goyal, Mohassel, and Smith (Eurocrypt 2008), meaning that their protocol does not allow to identify a cheating party, and show how to fix their original construction to obtain security against covert adversaries. We present generic compilers that transform arbitrary passively secure preprocessing protocols, i.e. protocols where the parties have no private inputs, into protocols that are secure against covert adversaries and publicly verifiable. Using our compiler, we construct the first efficient variants of the BMR and the SPDZ protocols that are secure and publicly verifiable against a covert adversary that corrupts all but one party, and also construct variants with covert security and identifiable abort. We observe that an existing impossibility result by Ishai, Ostrovsky, and Seyalioglu (TCC 2012) can be used to show that there exist certain functionalities that cannot be realized by parties, that have oracle-access to broadcast and arbitrary two-party functionalities, with information-theoretic security against a covert adversary.
Recently, several new techniques were presented to dramatically improve key parts of secure two-party computation (2PC) protocols that use the cut-and-choose paradigm on garbled circuits for 2PC with security against malicious adversaries. These include techniques for reducing the number of garbled circuits (Lindell 13, Huang et al. 13, Lindell and Riva 14, Huang et al. 14) and techniques for reducing the overheads besides garbled circuits (Mohassel and Riva 13, Shen and Shelat~13). We design a highly optimized protocol in the offline/online setting that makes use of all state-of-the-art techniques, along with several new techniques that we introduce. A crucial part of our protocol is a new technique for enforcing consistency of the inputs used by the party who garbles the circuits. This technique has both theoretical and practical advantages over previous methods.
Recently, several new techniques were presented to dramatically improve key parts of secure two-party computation (2PC) protocols that use the cut-and-choose paradigm on garbled cir-cuits for 2PC with security against malicious adversaries. These include techniques for reducing the number of garbled circuits (Lindell 13, Huang et al. 13, Lindell and Riva 14, Huang et al. 14) and techniques for reducing the overheads besides garbled circuits (Mohassel and Riva 13, Shen and Shelat 13). We design a highly optimized protocol in the offline/online setting that makes use of all state-of-the-art techniques, along with several new techniques that we introduce. A crucial part of our protocol is a new technique for enforcing consistency of the inputs used by the party who garbles the circuits. This technique has both theoretical and practical advantages over previous methods. We present a prototype implementation of our new protocol, which is also the first imple-mentation of the amortized cut-and-choose technique of Lindell and Riva (Crypto 2014). Our prototype achieves a speed of just 7 ms in the online stage and just 74 ms in the offline stage per 2PC invoked, for securely computing AES in the presence of malicious adversaries (using 9 threads on two 2.9GHz machines located in the same Amazon region). We note that no prior work has gone below one second overall on average for the secure computation of AES for mali-cious adversaries (nor below 20ms in the online stage). Our implementation securely evaluates SHA-256 (which is a much bigger circuit) with 33 ms online time and 206 ms offline time, per 2PC invoked. 1
Secure computation involves multiple parties computing a common function while keeping their inputs private, and is a growing field of cryptography due to its potential for maintaining privacy guarantees in real-world applications. However, current secure computation protocols are not yet efficient enough to be used in practice. We argue that this is due to much of the research effort being focused on generality rather than specificity. Namely, current research tends to focus on constructing and improving protocols for the strongest notions of security or for an arbitrary number of parties. However, in real-world deployments, these security notions are often too strong, or the number of parties running a protocol would be smaller. In this thesis we make several steps towards bridging the efficiency gap of secure computation by focusing on constructing efficient protocols for specific real-world settings and security models. In particular, we make the following four contributions: - We show an efficient (when amortized over multiple runs) maliciously secure two-party secure computation (2PC) protocol in the multiple-execution setting, where the same function is computed multiple times by the same pair of parties. - We improve the efficiency of 2PC protocols in the publicly verifiable covert security model, where a party can cheat with some probability but if it gets caught then the honest party obtains a certificate proving that the given party cheated. - We show how to optimize existing 2PC protocols when the function to be computed includes predicate checks on its inputs. - We demonstrate an efficient maliciously secure protocol in the three-party setting.
We describe a highly optimized protocol for generalpurpose secure two-party computation (2PC) in the presence of malicious adversaries. Our starting point is a protocol of Kolesnikov et al. (TCC 2015). We adapt that protocol to the online/offline setting, where two parties repeatedly evaluate the same function (on possibly different inputs each time) and perform as much of the computation as possible in an offline preprocessing phase before their inputs are known. Along the way we develop several significant simplifications and optimizations to the protocol. We have implemented a prototype of our protocol and report on its performance. When two parties on Amazon servers in the same region use our implementation to securely evaluate the AES circuit 1024 times, the amortized cost per evaluation is 5.1ms offline + 1.3ms online. The total offline+online cost of our protocol is in fact less than the online cost of any reported protocol with malicious security. For comparison, our protocol’s closest competitor (Lindell & Riva, CCS 2015) uses 74ms offline + 7ms online in an identical setup. Our protocol can be further tuned to trade performance for leakage. As an example, the performance in the above scenario improves to 2.4ms offline + 1.0ms online if we allow an adversary to learn a single bit about the honest party’s input with probability 2−20 (but not violate any other security property, e.g. correctness).