Papers tagged as MPC
1. usenix.org
Sahar Mazloom, Phi Hung Le, Samuel Ranellucci, and Dov Gordon

We revisit the problem of performing secure computation of graph-parallel algorithms, focusing on the applications of securely outsourcing matrix factorization, and histograms. Leveraging recent results in low-communication secure multi-party computation, and a security relaxation that allows the computation servers to learn some differentially private leakage about user inputs, we construct a new protocol that reduces overall runtime by 320X, reduces the number of AES calls by 750X , and reduces the total communication by 200X . Our system can securely compute histograms over 300 million items in about 4 minutes, and it can perform sparse matrix factorization, which is commonly used in recommendation systems, on 20 million records in about 6 minutes. Furthermore, in contrast to prior work, our system is secure against a malicious adversary that corrupts one of the computing servers.

2. acmccs.github.io
Vladimir Kolesnikov, Naor Matania, Benny Pinkas, Mike Rosulek, and Ni Trieu

We present a new paradigm for multi-party private set intersection (PSI) that allows $n$ parties to compute the intersection of their datasets without revealing any additional information. We explore a variety of instantiations of this paradigm. Our protocols avoid computationally expensive public-key operations and are secure in the presence of any number of semi-honest participants (i.e., without an honest majority).

We demonstrate the practicality of our protocols with an implementation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first implementation of a multi-party PSI protocol. For 5 parties with data-sets of 220 items each, our protocol requires only 72 seconds. In an optimization achieving a slightly weaker variant of security (augmented semi-honest model), the same task requires only 22 seconds.

The technical core of our protocol is oblivious evaluation of a programmable pseudorandom function (OPPRF), which we instantiate in three different ways. We believe our new OPPRF abstraction and constructions may be of independent interest.

3. fc17.ifca.ai

Isolated Execution Environments (IEE) offered by novel commodity hardware such as Intel’s SGX deployed in Skylake processors permit executing software in a protected environment that shields it from a malicious operating system; it also permits a remote user to obtain strong interactive attestation guarantees on both the code running in an IEE and its input/output behaviour. In this paper we show how IEEs provide a new path to constructing general secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols. Our protocol is intuitive and elegant: it uses code within an IEE to play the role of a trusted third party (TTP), and the attestation guarantees of SGX to bootstrap secure communications between participants and the TTP. In our protocol the load of communications and computations on participants only depends on the size of each party’s inputs and outputs and is thus small and independent from the intricacy of the functionality to be computed. The remaining computational load– essentially that of computing the functionality – is moved to an untrusted party running an IEE-enabled machine, an appealing feature for Cloud-based scenarios. However, as often the case even with the simplest cryptographic protocols, we found that there is a large gap between this intuitively appealing solution and a protocol with rigorous security guarantees. We bridge this gap through a comprehensive set of results that include: i. a detailed construction of a protocol for secure computation for arbitrary functionalities; ii. formal security definitions for the security of the overall protocol and that of its components; and iii. a modular security analysis of our protocol that relies on a novel notion of labeled attested computation. We implemented and extensively evaluated our solution on SGX-enabled hardware, providing detailed measurements of our protocol as well as comparisons with software-only MPC solutions. Furthermore, we show the cost induced by using constant-time, i.e., timing side channel resilient, code in our implementation.

4. eprint.iacr.org
Toshinori Araki, Assi Barak, Jun Furukawa, Marcel Keller, Yehuda Lindell, Kazuma Ohara, and Hikaru Tsuchida

Protocols for secure multiparty computation (MPC) enable a set of mutually distrusting parties to compute an arbitrary function of their inputs while preserving basic security properties like \emph{privacy} and \emph{correctness}. The study of MPC was initiated in the 1980s where it was shown that any function can be securely computed, thus demonstrating the power of this notion. However, these proofs of feasibility were theoretical in nature and it is only recently that MPC protocols started to become efficient enough for use in practice. Today, we have protocols that can carry out large and complex computations in very reasonable time (and can even be very fast, depending on the computation and the setting). Despite this amazing progress, there is still a major obstacle to the adoption and use of MPC due to the huge expertise needed to design a specific MPC execution. In particular, the function to be computed needs to be represented as an appropriate Boolean or arithmetic circuit, and this requires very specific expertise. In order to overcome this, there has been considerable work on compilation of code to (typically) Boolean circuits. One work in this direction takes a different approach, and this is the SPDZ compiler (not to be confused with the SPDZ protocol) that takes high-level Python code and provides an MPC run-time environment for securely executing that code. The SPDZ compiler can deal with arithmetic and non-arithmetic operations and is extremely powerful. However, until now, the SPDZ compiler could only be used for the specific SPDZ family of protocols, making its general applicability and usefulness very limited.

In this paper, we extend the SPDZ compiler so that it can work with general underlying protocols. Our SPDZ extensions were made in mind to enable the use of SPDZ for arbitrary protocols and to make it easy for others to integrate existing and new protocols. We integrated three different types of protocols, an honest-majority protocol for computing arithmetic circuits over a field (for any number of parties), a three-party honest majority protocol for computing arithmetic circuits over the ring of integers \Z2n, and the multiparty BMR protocol for computing Boolean circuits. We show that a single high-level SPDZ-Python program can be executed using all of these underlying protocols (as well as the original SPDZ protocol), thereby making SPDZ a true general run-time MPC environment.

In order to be able to handle both arithmetic and non-arithmetic operations, the SPDZ compiler relies on conversions from field elements to bits and back. However, these conversions do not apply to ring elements (in particular, they require element division), and we therefore introduce new bit decomposition and recomposition protocols for the ring over integers with replicated secret sharing. These conversions are of independent interest and utilize the structure of \Z2n (which is much more amenable to bit decomposition than prime-order fields), and are thus much more efficient than all previous methods.

We demonstrate our compiler extensions by running a complex SQL query and a decision tree evaluation over all protocols.

5. eprint.iacr.org
Sahar Mazloom and S. Dov Gordon

We explore a new security model for secure computation on large datasets. We assume that two servers have been employed to compute on private data that was collected from many users, and, in order to improve the efficiency of their computation, we establish a new tradeoff with privacy. Specifically, instead of claiming that the servers learn nothing about the input values, we claim that what they do learn from the computation preserves the differential privacy of the input. Leveraging this relaxation of the security model allows us to build a protocol that leaks some information in the form of access patterns to memory, while also providing a formal bound on what is learned from the leakage.

We then demonstrate that this leakage is useful in a broad class of computations. We show that computations such as histograms, PageRank and matrix factorization, which can be performed in common graph-parallel frameworks such as MapReduce or Pregel, benefit from our relaxation. We implement a protocol for securely executing graph-parallel computations, and evaluate the performance on the three examples just mentioned above. We demonstrate marked improvement over prior implementations for these computations.

6. homes.sice.indiana.edu
Ruiyu Zhu, Darion Cassel, Amr Sabry, and Yan Huang

Existing actively-secure MPC protocols require either linear rounds or linear space. Due to this fundamental space-round dilemma, no existing MPC protocols is able to run large-scale computations without significantly sacrificing performance. To mitigate this issue, we developed nanoPI, which is practically efficient in terms of both time and space. Our protocol is based on WRK but introduces interesting and necessary modifications to address several important programmatic and cryptographic challenges. A technique that may be of independent interest (in transforming other computation-oriented cryptographic protocols) is a staged execution model, which we formally define and realize using a combination of lightweight static and dynamic program instrumentation. Our techniques are integrated in nanoPI, an open-source tool for efficiently building and running actively-secure extreme-scale MPC applications. We demonstrate the unprecedented scalability and performance of nanoPI by building and running a suit of bench- mark applications, including an actively-secure four-party logistical regression (involving 4.7 billion ANDs and 8.9 billion XORs) which finished in less than 28 hours on four small-memory machines.

Abdelrahaman Aly, Aysajan Abidin, and Svetla Nikova

Bit-decomposition is a powerful tool which can be used to design constant round protocols for bit-oriented multiparty computation (MPC) problems, such as comparison and Hamming weight computation. However, protocols that involve bit-decomposition are expensive in terms of performance. In this paper, we introduce a set of protocols for distributed exponentiation without bit-decomposition. We improve upon the current state-of-the-art by Ning and Xu [1, 2], in terms of round and multiplicative complexity. We consider different cases where the inputs are either private or public and present privacy-preserving protocols for each case. Our protocols offer perfect security against passive and active adversaries and have constant multiplicative and round complexity, for any fixed number of parties. Furthermore, we showcase how these primitives can be used, for instance, to perform secure distributed decryption for some public key schemes, that are based on modular exponentiation.

8. eprint.iacr.org
Christina Boura and Ilaria Chillotti and Nicolas Gama and Dimitar Jetchev and Stanislav Peceny and Alexander Petric

We propose a novel multi-party computation protocol for evaluating continuous real-valued functions with high numerical precision. Our method is based on approximations with Fourier series and uses at most two rounds of communication during the online phase. For the offline phase, we propose a trusted-dealer and honest-but-curious aided solution, respectively. We apply our algorithm to train a logistic regression classifier via a variant of Newton’s method (known as IRLS) to compute unbalanced classification problems that detect rare events and cannot be solved using previously proposed privacy-preserving optimization algorithms (e.g., based on piecewise-linear approximations of the sigmoid function). Our protocol is efficient as it can be implemented using standard quadruple-precision floating point arithmetic. We report multiple experiments and provide a demo application that implements our algorithm for training a logistic regression model.

9. marsella.github.io
Marcella Hastings, Brett Hemenway, Daniel Noble, and Steve Zdancewic

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows a group of mutually distrustful parties to compute a joint function on their inputs without revealing any information beyond the result of the computation. This type of computation is extremely powerful and has wide-ranging applications in academia, industry, and government. Protocols for secure computation have existed for decades, but only recently have general-purpose compilers for executing MPC on arbitrary functions been developed. These projects rapidly improved the state of the art, and began to make MPC accessible to non-expert users. However, the field is changing so rapidly that it is difficult even for experts to keep track of the varied capabilities of modern frameworks. In this work, we survey general-purpose compilers for secure multi-party computation. These tools provide high-level abstractions to describe arbitrary functions and execute secure computation protocols. We consider eleven systems: EMP-toolkit, Obliv-C, ObliVM, TinyGarble, SCALE-MAMBA (formerly SPDZ), Wysteria, Sharemind, PICCO, ABY, Frigate and CBMC-GC. We evaluate these systems on a range of criteria, including language expressibility, capabilities of the cryptographic back-end, and accessibility to developers. We advocate for improved documentation of MPC frameworks, standardization within the community, and make recommendations for future directions in compiler development. Installing and running these systems can be challenging, and for each system, we also provide a complete virtual environment (Docker container) with all the necessary dependencies to run the compiler and our example programs.

10. eprint.iacr.org
Assi Barak, Martin Hirt and Lior Koskas, and Yehuda Lindell

Protocols for secure multiparty computation enable a set of parties to compute a joint function of their inputs, while preserving \emph{privacy}, \emph{correctness} and more. In theory, secure computation has broad applicability and can be used to solve many of the modern concerns around utilization of data and privacy. Huge steps have been made towards this vision in the past few years, and we now have protocols that can carry out large computations extremely efficiently, especially in the setting of an honest majority. However, in practice, there are still major barriers to widely deploying secure computation, especially in a decentralized manner.

In this paper, we present the first end-to-end automated system for deploying large-scale MPC protocols between end users, called MPSaaS (for \textit{MPC system-as-a-service}). Our system enables parties to pre-enroll in an upcoming MPC computation, and then participate by either running software on a VM instance (e.g., in Amazon), or by running the protocol on a mobile app, in Javascript in their browser, or even on an IoT device. Our system includes an automation system for deploying MPC protocols, an administration component for setting up an MPC computation and inviting participants, and an end-user component for running the MPC protocol in realistic end-user environments. We demonstrate our system for a specific application of running secure polls and surveys, where the secure computation is run end-to-end with each party actually running the protocol (i.e., without relying on a set of servers to run the protocol for them). This is the first such system constructed, and is a big step forward to the goal of commoditizing MPC.

One of the cryptographic difficulties that arise in this type of setting is due to the fact that end users may have low bandwidth connections, making it a challenge to run an MPC protocol with high bandwidth. We therefore present a protocol based on Beerliova-Trubiniova and Hirt (TCC 2008) with many optimizations, that has very low concrete communication, and the lowest published for small fields. Our protocol is secure as long as less than a third of the parties are \textit{malicious}, and is well suited for computing both arithmetic and Boolean circuits. We call our protocol HyperMPC and show that it has impressive performance. In particular, 150 parties can compute statistics—mean, standard deviation and regression—on 4,000,000 inputs (with a circuit of size 16,000,000 gates of which 6,000,000 are multiplication) in five minutes, and 10 parties can compute the same circuit in 30 seconds. Although our end-to-end system can be used to run any MPC protocol (and we have incorporated numerous protocols already), we demonstrate it for our new protocol that is optimized for end-users without high bandwidth.

11. eprint.iacr.org
Yehuda Lindell, Ariel Nof, and Samuel Ranellucci

ECDSA is a standardized signing algorithm that is widely used in TLS, code signing, cryptocurrency and more. Due to its importance, the problem of securely computing ECDSA in a distributed manner (known as threshold signing) has received considerable interest. However, despite this interest, there is still no full threshold solution for more than 2 parties (meaning that any t-out-of-n parties can sign, security is preserved for any t−1 or fewer corrupted parties, and t≤n can be any value thus supporting an honest minority) that has practical key distribution. This is due to the fact that all previous solutions for this utilize Paillier homomorphic encryption, and efficient distributed Paillier key generation for more than two parties is not known.

In this paper, we present the first truly practical full threshold ECDSA signing protocol that has both fast signing and fast key distribution. This solves a years-old open problem, and opens the door to practical uses of threshold ECDSA signing that are in demand today. One of these applications is the construction of secure cryptocurrency wallets (where key shares are spread over multiple devices and so are hard to steal) and cryptocurrency custody solutions (where large sums of invested cryptocurrency are strongly protected by splitting the key between a bank/financial institution, the customer who owns the currency, and possibly a third-party trustee, in multiple shares at each). There is growing practical interest in such solutions, but prior to our work these could not be deployed today due to the need for distributed key generation.

12. encrypto.de
Niklas Büscher, Daniel Demmler, Stefan Katzenbeisser, David Kretzmer, and Thomas Schneider

While secure multi-party computation (MPC) is a vibrant research topic and a multitude of practical MPC applications have been presented recently, their development is still a tedious task that requires expert knowledge. Previous works have made first steps in compiling high-level descriptions from various source descriptions into MPC protocols, but only looked at a limited set of protocols. In this work we present HyCC, a tool-chain for automated compilation of ANSI C programs into hybrid protocols that efficiently and securely combine multiple MPC protocols with optimizing compilation, scheduling, and partitioning. As a result, our compiled protocols are able to achieve performance numbers that are comparable to hand-built solutions. For the MiniONN neural network (Liu et al., CCS 2017), our compiler improves performance of the resulting protocol by more than a factor of $3$. Thus, for the first time, highly efficient hybrid MPC becomes accessible for developers without cryptographic background.

13. eprint.iacr.org
Carmit Hazay and Emmanuela Orsini and Peter Scholl and Eduardo Soria-Vazquez

In this work we develop a new theory for concretely efficient, large-scale MPC with active security. Current practical techniques are mostly in the strong setting of all-but-one corruptions, which leads to protocols that scale badly with the number of parties. To work around this issue, we consider a large-scale scenario where a small minority out of many parties is honest and design scalable, more efficient MPC protocols for this setting. Our results are achieved by introducing new techniques for information-theoretic MACs with short keys and extending the work of Hazay et al. (CRYPTO 2018), which developed new passively secure MPC protocols in the same context. We further demonstrate the usefulness of this theory in practice by analyzing the concrete communication overhead of our protocols, which improve upon the most efficient previous works.

14. eprint.iacr.org
Jonathan Katz and Samuel Ranellucci and Mike Rosulek and Xiao Wang

Wang et al. (CCS 2017) recently proposed a protocol for malicious secure two-party computation that represents the state-of-the- art with regard to concrete efficiency in both the single-execution and amortized settings, with or without preprocessing. We show here several optimizations of their protocol that result in a significant improvement in the overall communication and running time. Specifically:

• We show how to make the “authenticated garbling” at the heart of their protocol compatible with the half-gate optimization of Zahur et al. (Eurocrypt 2015). We also show how to avoid sending an information-theoretic MAC for each garbled row. These two optimizations give up to a 2.6x improvement in communication, and make the communication of the online phase essentially equivalent to that of state-of-the-art semi-honest secure computation.

• We show various optimizations to their protocol for generating AND triples that, overall, result in a 1.5x improvement in the communication and a 2x improvement in the computation for that step.

15. eprint.iacr.org
Ruiyu Zhu and Yan Huang

LEGO-style cut-and-choose is known for its asymptotic efficiency in realizing actively-secure computations. The dominant cost of LEGO protocols is due to wire-soldering — the key technique enabling to put independently generated garbled gates together in a bucket to realize a logical gate. Existing wire-soldering constructions rely on homomorphic commitments and their security requires the majority of the garbled gates in every bucket to be correct.

In this paper, we propose an efficient construction of LEGO protocols that does not use homomorphic commitments but is able to guarantee security as long as at least one of the garbled gate in each bucket is correct. Additionally, the faulty gate detection rate in our protocol doubles that of the state-of-the-art LEGO constructions. With moderate additional cost, our approach can even detect faulty gates with probability 1, which enables us to run cut- and-choose on larger circuit gadgets rather than individual AND gates. We have implemented our protocol and our experiments on several benchmark applications show that the performance of our approach is highly competitive in comparison with existing implementations.

16. eprint.iacr.org
W. Sean Kennedy and Vladimir Kolesnikov and Gordon Wilfong

Given a set S = {C_1,…,C_k } of Boolean circuits, we show how to construct a universal for S circuit C_0, which is much smaller than Valiant’s universal circuit or a circuit incorporating all C_1,…,C_k. Namely, given C_1,…,C_k and viewing them as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) D_1,…,D_k, we embed them in a new graph D_0. The embedding is such that a GC garbling of any of C_1,…,C_k could be implemented by a corresponding garbling of a circuit corresponding to D_0.

We show how to improve Garbled Circuit (GC) and GMW-based secure function evaluation (SFE) of circuits with if/switch clauses using such S-universal circuit.

The most interesting case here is the application to the GMW approach. We provide a novel observation that in GMW the cost of processing a gate is almost the same for 5 (or more) Boolean inputs, as it is for the usual case of 2 Boolean inputs. While we expect this observation to greatly improve general GMW-based computation, in our context this means that GMW gates can be programmed almost for free, based on the secret-shared programming of the clause.

Our approach naturally and cheaply supports nested clauses. Our algorithm is a heuristic; we show that solving the circuit embedding problem is NP-hard. Our algorithms are in the semi-honest model and are compatible with Free-XOR.

We report on experimental evaluations and discuss achieved performance in detail. For 32 diverse circuits in our experiment, our construction results 6.1x smaller circuit than prior techniques.

17. eprint.iacr.org
Koji Chida and Daniel Genkin and Koki Hamada and Dai Ikarashi and Ryo Kikuchi and Yehuda Lindell and Ariel Nof

Protocols for secure multiparty computation enable a set of parties to compute a function of their inputs without revealing anything but the output. The security properties of the protocol must be preserved in the presence of adversarial behavior. The two classic adversary models considered are semi-honest (where the adversary follows the protocol specification but tries to learn more than allowed by examining the protocol transcript) and malicious (where the adversary may follow any arbitrary attack strategy). Protocols for semi-honest adversaries are often far more efficient, but in many cases the security guarantees are not strong enough.

In this paper, we present new protocols for securely computing any functionality represented by an arithmetic circuit. We utilize a new method for verifying that the adversary does not cheat, that yields a cost of just twice that of semi-honest protocols in some settings. Our protocols are information-theoretically secure in the presence of a malicious adversaries, assuming an honest majority. We present protocol variants for small and large fields, and show how to efficiently instantiate them based on replicated secret sharing and Shamir sharing. As with previous works in this area aiming to achieve high efficiency, our protocol is secure with abort and does not achieve fairness, meaning that the adversary may receive output while the honest parties do not.

We implemented our protocol and ran experiments for different numbers of parties, different network configurations and different circuit depths. Our protocol significantly outperforms the previous best for this setting (Lindell and Nof, CCS 2017); for a large number of parties, our implementation runs almost an order of magnitude faster than theirs.

18. eprint.iacr.org
Carmit Hazay and Emmanuela Orsini and Peter Scholl and Eduardo Soria-Vazquez

We present a new approach to designing concretely efficient MPC protocols with semi-honest security in the dishonest majority setting. Motivated by the fact that within the dishonest majority setting the efficiency of most practical protocols does not depend on the number of honest parties, we investigate how to construct protocols which improve in efficiency as the number of honest parties increases. Our central idea is to take a protocol which is secure for n−1 corruptions and modify it to use short symmetric keys, with the aim of basing security on the concatenation of all honest parties’ keys. This results in a more efficient protocol tolerating fewer corruptions, whilst also introducing an LPN-style syndrome decoding assumption.

We first apply this technique to a modified version of the semi-honest GMW protocol, using OT extension with short keys, to improve the efficiency of standard GMW with fewer corruptions. We also obtain more efficient constant-round MPC, using BMR-style garbled circuits with short keys, and present an implementation of the online phase of this protocol. Our techniques start to improve upon existing protocols when there are around n=20
parties with h=6 honest parties, and as these increase we obtain up to a 13 times reduction (for n=400,h=120) in communication complexity for our GMW variant, compared with the best-known GMW-based protocol modified to use the same threshold.

19. eprint.iacr.org
Aner Ben-Efraim and Yehuda Lindell and Eran Omri

In the setting of secure multiparty computation, a set of mutually distrustful parties carry out a joint computation of their inputs, without revealing anything but the output. Over recent years, there has been tremendous progress towards making secure computation practical, with great success in the two-party case. In contrast, in the multiparty case, progress has been much slower, even for the case of semi-honest adversaries.

In this paper, we consider the case of constant-round multiparty computation, via the garbled circuit approach of BMR (Beaver et al., STOC 1990). In recent work, it was shown that this protocol can be efficiently instantiated for semi-honest adversaries (Ben-Efraim et al., ACM CCS 2016). However, it scales very poorly with the number of parties, since the cost of garbled circuit evaluation is quadratic in the number of parties, per gate. Thus, for a large number of parties, it becomes expensive. We present a new way of constructing a BMR-type garbled circuit that can be evaluated with only a constant number of operations per gate. Our constructions use key-homomorphic pseudorandom functions (one based on DDH and the other on Ring-LWE) and are concretely efficient. In particular, for a large number of parties (e.g., 100), our new circuit can be evaluated faster than the standard BMR garbled circuit that uses only AES computations. Thus, our protocol is an important step towards achieving concretely efficient large-scale multiparty computation for Internet-like settings (where constant-round protocols are needed due to high latency).

20. eprint.iacr.org
Chris Culnane, Olivier Pereira, Kim Ramchen, and Vanessa Teague

We present a very simple universally verifiable MPC protocol. The first component is a threshold somewhat homomorphic cryptosystem that permits an arbitrary number of additions (in the source group), followed by a single multiplication, followed by an arbitrary number of additions in the target group. The second component is a black-box construction of universally verifiable distributed encryption switching between any public key encryption schemes supporting shared setup and key generation phases, as long as the schemes satisfy some natural additive-homomorphic properties. This allows us to switch back from the target group to the source group, and hence perform an arbitrary number of multiplications. The key generation algorithm of our prototypical cryptosystem, which is based upon concurrent verifiable secret sharing, permits robust re-construction of powers of a shared secret. We demonstrate the scalability of distribution switching as a viable approach to secure vote tallying by implementing a private verifiable form of Instant Runoff Voting on real Australian election data comprising 40,000 votes.

21. eprint.iacr.org
Ronald Cramer and Ivan Damgård and Daniel Escudero and Peter Scholl and Chaoping Xing

Most multi-party computation protocols allow secure computation of arithmetic circuits over a finite field, such as the integers modulo a prime. In the more natural setting of integer computations modulo 2^k, which are useful for simplifying implementations and applications, no solutions with active security are known unless the majority of the participants are honest.

We present a new scheme for information-theoretic MACs that are homomorphic modulo 2^k, and are as efficient as the well-known standard solutions that are homomorphic over fields. We apply this to construct an MPC protocol for dishonest majority in the preprocessing model that has efficiency comparable to the well-known SPDZ protocol (Damgård et al., CRYPTO 2012), with operations modulo 2^k instead of over a field. We also construct a matching preprocessing protocol based on oblivious transfer, which is in the style of the MASCOT protocol (Keller et al., CCS 2016) and almost as efficient.

22. eprint.iacr.org
Iddo Bentov and Ranjit Kumaresan and Andrew Miller

We present efficient protocols for amortized secure multiparty computation with penalties and secure cash distribution, of which poker is a prime example. Our protocols have an initial phase where the parties interact with a cryptocurrency network, that then enables them to interact only among themselves over the course of playing many poker games in which money changes hands. The high efficiency of our protocols is achieved by harnessing the power of stateful contracts. Compared to the limited expressive power of Bitcoin scripts, stateful contracts enable richer forms of interaction between standard secure computation and a cryptocurrency. We formalize the stateful contract model and the security notions that our protocols accomplish, and provide proofs in the simulation paradigm. Moreover, we provide a reference implementation in Ethereum/Solidity for the stateful contracts that our protocols are based on. We also adapt our off-chain cash distribution protocols to the special case of stateful duplex micropayment channels, which are of independent interest. In comparison to Bitcoin based payment channels, our duplex channel implementation is more efficient and has additional features.

23. eprint.iacr.org
Marcel Keller, Valerio Pastro, and Dragos Rotaru

SPDZ denotes a multiparty computation scheme in the preprocessing model based on somewhat homomorphic encryption (SHE) in the form of BGV. At CCS ’16, Keller et al. presented MASCOT, a replacement of the preprocessing phase using oblivious transfer instead of SHE, improving by two orders of magnitude on the SPDZ implementation by Damgård et al. (ESORICS ’13). In this work, we show that using SHE is faster than MASCOT in many aspects:

• We present a protocol that uses semi-homomorphic (addition-only) encryption. For two parties, our BGV-based implementation is 6 times faster than MASCOT on a LAN and 20 times faster in a WAN setting. The latter is roughly the reduction in communication.

• We show that using the proof of knowledge in the original work by Damgård et al. (Crypto ’12) is more efficient in practice than the one used in the implementation mentioned above by about one order of magnitude.

• We present an improvement to the verification of the aforementioned proof of knowledge that increases the performance with a growing number of parties, doubling it for 16 parties.

24. eprint.iacr.org
Marcel Keller and Avishay Yanai

A crucial issue, that mostly affects the performance of actively secure computation of RAM programs, is the task of reading/writing from/to memory in a private and authenticated manner. Previous works in the active security and multiparty settings are based purely on the SPDZ (reactive) protocol, hence, memory accesses are treated just like any input to the computation. However, a garbled-circuit-based construction (such as BMR), which benefits from a lower round complexity, must resolve the issue of converting memory data bits to their corresponding wire keys and vice versa.

In this work we propose three techniques to construct a secure memory access, each appropriates to a different level of abstraction of the underlying garbling functionality. We provide a comparison between the techniques by several metrics. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to construct, prove and implement a concretely efficient garbled-circuit-based actively secure RAM computation with dishonest majority.

Our construction is based on our third (most efficient) technique, cleverly utilizing the underlying SPDZ authenticated shares (Damgård et al., Crypto 2012), yields lean circuits and a constant number of communication rounds per physical memory access. Specifically, it requires no additional circuitry on top of the ORAM’s, incurs only two rounds of broadcasts between every two memory accesses and has a multiplicative overhead of 2 on top of the ORAM’s storage size.

Our protocol outperforms the state of the art in this settings when deployed over WAN. Even when simulating a very conservative RTT of 100ms our protocol is at least one order of magnitude faster than the current state of the art protocol of Keller and Scholl (Asiacrypt 2015).

25. eprint.iacr.org
Benny Pinkas, Thomas Schneider, Christian Weinert, and Udi Wieder

While there has been a lot of progress in designing efficient custom protocols for computing Private Set Intersection (PSI), there has been less research on using generic Multi-Party Computation (MPC) protocols for this task. However, there are many variants of the set intersection functionality that are not addressed by the existing custom PSI solutions and are easy to compute with generic MPC protocols (e.g., comparing the cardinality of the intersection with a threshold or measuring ad conversion rates).

Generic PSI protocols work over circuits that compute the intersection. For sets of size n, the best known circuit constructions conduct O(nlogn) or O(nlogn/loglogn) comparisons (Huang et al., NDSS’12 and Pinkas et al., USENIX Security’15). In this work, we propose new circuit-based protocols for computing variants of the intersection with an almost linear number of comparisons. Our constructions are based on new variants of Cuckoo hashing in two dimensions.

We present an asymptotically efficient protocol as well as a protocol with better concrete efficiency. For the latter protocol, we determine the required sizes of tables and circuits experimentally, and show that the run-time is concretely better than that of existing constructions.

The protocol can be extended to a larger number of parties. The proof technique for analyzing Cuckoo hashing in two dimensions is new and can be generalized to analyzing standard Cuckoo hashing as well as other new variants of it.