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ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)

Separating Broadcast from Cheater Identification

Yashvanth Kondi, Divya Ravi

Published Nov 19, 2025• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) protocols that achieve Identifiable Abort (IA) guarantee honest parties that if they are denied output, they will be notified of the identity of at least one corrupt party. Cheater identification provides recourse in the event of a protocol failure, and in some settings---such as key management---can even be desired over Guaranteed Output Delivery. However, unlike the weaker security with abort setting, IA protocols make integral use of a broadcast channel.

DOI
10.1145/3719027.3765041

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arXiv:2406.06914•ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC)•Jun 5, 2024•0 citations
Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) protocols that achieve Identifiable Abort (IA) guarantee honest parties that if they are denied output, they will be notified of the identity of at least one corrupt party. Cheater identification provides recourse in the event of a protocol failure, and in some settings---such as key management---can even be desired over Guaranteed Output Delivery. However, unlike the weaker security with abort setting, IA protocols make integral use of a broadcast channel.
Secure multi-party computation (MPC) protocols do not completely prevent malicious parties from cheating or disrupting the computation. We augment MPC with three new properties to discourage cheating. First is a strengthening of identifiable abort, called completely identifiable abort, where all parties who do not follow the protocol will be identified as cheaters by each honest party. The second is completely identifiable auditability, which means that a third party can determine whether the computation was performed correctly (and who cheated if it was not). The third is openability, which means that a distinguished coalition of parties can recover the MPC inputs.
Secure Multi-party Computation (MPC) with small population and honest majority has drawn focus specifically due to customization in techniques and resulting efficiency that the constructions can offer. In this work, we investigate a wide range of security notions in the five-party setting, tolerating two active corruptions. Being constant-round, our protocols are best suited for real-time, high latency networks such as the Internet. In a minimal setting of pairwise-private channels, we present efficient instantiations with unanimous abort (where either all honest parties obtain the output or none of them do) and fairness (where the adversary obtains its output only if all honest parties also receive it). With the presence of an additional broadcast channel (known to be necessary), we present a construction with guaranteed output delivery (where any adversarial behaviour cannot prevent the honest parties from receiving the output). The broadcast communication is minimal and independent of circuit size. In terms of performance (communication and run time), our protocols incur minimal overhead over the best known protocol of Chandran et al. (ACM CCS 2016) that achieves the least security of selective abort. Further, our protocols for fairness and unanimous abort can be extended to n-parties with at most √n corruptions, similar to Chandran et al. Going beyond the most popular honest-majority setting of three parties with one corruption, our results demonstrate feasibility of attaining stronger security notions for more than one active corruption at an expense not too far from the least desired security of selective abort.
Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) is an expression encompassing cryptographic techniques that allow mutually distrustful parties to jointly perform computations over private data, ensuring correctness and preserving privacy despite malicious behavior. Guaranteed output is the strongest security goal for MPC: protocols with this property always deliver results. This is in contrast with weaker notions that allow malicious aborts. The seminal works of Ben-Or, Goldwasser, and Wigderson (STOC’88) and Rabin and Ben-Or (STOC’89) showed interactive protocols to compute any function with guaranteed output and perfect security if fewer than one third of parties are corrupted, or with statistical security (with a small error probability) if fewer than half are corrupted. These results hold when the set of participants is fixed throughout the execution. Ostrovsky and Yung’s proactive model (PODC’91) relaxes this assumption by allowing the set of corrupted parties to evolve over time, better capturing the dynamics of long-lived computations, where machines may be periodically compromised and recovered. The recent YOSO (You Only Speak Once) and fluid MPC models (CRYPTO’21) push this ambitious modelling even further by allowing for fully dynamic participation, with parties joining and leaving the computation at will. In this setting, known protocols with guaranteed output fall short of optimal resilience or rely on non-standard communication and adversarial assumptions. Matching the classical BGW and Rabin–Ben-Or bounds in these settings remained an open problem. We resolve these questions within the Layered MPC abstraction of David et al. (CRYPTO’23), in which the interaction pattern of a protocol is restricted to be a layered graph, meaning parties are partitioned into a sequence of disjoint sets (layers) and can send private and broadcast messages to parties in immediately subsequent layers. We match the BGW and Rabin and Ben-Or bounds in this model, fully characterizing the feasibility landscape of Layered MPC with guaranteed output. As a stepping stone towards our statistically secure protocol, we construct a more efficient and conceptually simpler computationally secure protocol relying on linear non-interactive commitments. Our results yield optimally-resilient and maximally-proactive MPC protocols with guaranteed output for both perfect and statistical security.
Dishonest majority considered in the SPDZ(the nickname of the protocol of Damgard et al. from Crypto 2012) protocols implies the impossibility of fairness(which means that corrupted parties can prevent the honest parties from learning output). The corrupted parties can learn the outputs of the honest parties and abort the protocol. Settling for the second best, there are many works focusing on the detection of the cheaters. We construct a SPDZ-like protocol which achieves fairness when at mostn/2n/2n/2parties behave maliciously and supports identifiable abort for dishonest majority. We suggest a sharing stage after the parties finish their computation. The parties share the returns of the computation in this stage. The correctness of the sharing is guaranteed by verifiable secret sharing and homomorphic signature. The honest parties can reconstruct the outputs of the cheaters in the setting of an honest majority. We can't prevent the corrupted parties from learning the outputs and aborting the protocol for dishonest majority. Therefore, the sharing stage does not harm to the honest parties. Instead, we provide the honest parties with the identities of all cheaters in this case.
Abstract. Existing communication models for multiparty computation (MPC) either assume that all messages are delivered eventually or any message can be lost. Under the former assumption, MPC protocols guaranteeing output delivery are known. However, this assumption may not hold in some network settings like the Internet where messages can be lost due to denial of service attack or heavy network congestion. On the other hand, the latter assumption may be too conservative. Known MPC protocols developed under this assumption have an undesirable feature: output delivery is not guaranteed even only one party suffers message loss. In this work, we propose a communication model which makes an intermediate assumption on message delivery. In our model, there is a common global clock and three types of parties: (i) Corrupted parties (ii) Honest parties with connection problems (where message delivery is never guaranteed) (iii) Honest parties that can normally communicate but may lose a small fraction of messages at each round due to transient network problems. We define secure MPC under this model. Output delivery is guaranteed to type (ii) parties that do not abort and type (iii) parties. Let n be the total number of parties, ef and ec be upper bounds on the number of corrupted parties and type (ii) parties respectively. We construct a secure MPC protocol for n> 4ef + 3ec. Protocols for broadcast and verifiable secret sharing are constructed along the way. 1
A central goal of cryptography is Secure Multi-party Computation (MPC), where n parties desire to compute a function of their joint inputs without letting any party learn about the inputs of its peers. Unfortunately, it is well-known that MPC guaranteeing output delivery to every party is infeasible when a majority of the parties are malicious. In fact, parties operating over a point-to-point network (i.e., without access to a broadcast channel) cannot even reach an agreement on the output when more than one third of the parties are malicious (Lamport, Shostak, and Pease, JACM 1980).