The round complexity of secure protocols

By Donald Beaver, Silvio Micali, Phillip Rogaway. 1990

Assume we have a network of three or more players, each player in possession of some private input. The players want to compute some function of these private inputs, but in a way which protects the privacy of each participant's contribution. Not all of the players can be trusted to do as they are instructed. The resources the players are given to accomplish their goal are communication--the ability to privately send messages to one another, or to broadcast messages to the community as a whole--and local computation. Many insightful protocols have been proposed for solving this problem of multiparty secure function evaluation. Building on Yao's protocol for the case of two players (Ya86), Goldreich, Micali and Wigderson (GMW87) offered the first general protocol for this problem, and they provided the paradigm on which a large body of successive work was based. Despite enormous progress, research on secure function evaluation has suffered from some serious shortcomings. First, though many protocols have been devised for solving the problem, what, exactly, these protocols accomplish has not been fully understood. In fact, no rigorously specified and generally accepted definitions have been proposed in this field. Second, protocols for multiparty secure function evaluation could be extremely inefficient, the main cause being that they required an unbounded (and usually large) number of communication rounds. We address both of these points, carefully crafting definitions which satisfactorily deal with the myriad of issues lurking here, and offering a new protocol for multiparty secure function evaluation--one which categorically improves the complexity requirements for this task. The new protocol completely divorces the computational complexity of the function being collaboratively computed from the round complexity of the protocol that evaluates it. Using this approach, we show that a rigorously-specified and extremely strong notion of secure function evaluation can be achieved by a protocol which requires only a fixed constant number of rounds of interaction. This result assumes only the existence of a one-way function and that the majority of the participants to the protocol behave correctly. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.)

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

  1. David E. Evans
  2. Yehuda Lindell
  3. Adrià Gascón
  4. Thomas Schneider
  5. Benny Pinkas
  6. Marcel Keller
  7. Samee Zahur
  8. Xiao Shaun Wang

Citations in the corpus