Asymmetric Cryptography

4Secure Multiparty Computation

Yehuda LINDELL

Coinbase, San Francisco, United States

Protocols for secure multiparty computation (MPC) enable a set of parties to interact and compute a joint function of their private inputs while revealing nothing but the output. The potential applications for MPC are huge: privacy-preserving auctions, private DNA comparisons, private machine learning, threshold cryptography, and so on. Due to this, MPC has been an intensive topic of research in academia ever since it was introduced in the 1980s by Yao (1986) for the two-party case, and by Goldreich et al. (1986) for the multiparty case. Recently, MPC has become efficient enough to be used in practice, and has made the transition from an object of theoretical study to a technology being used in industry. In this chapter, we will review what MPC is, what problems it solves and how it is being currently used.

We note that the examples and references brought in this review chapter are far from comprehensive, and due to the lack of space many highly relevant works are not cited.

4.1. Introduction

Distributed computing considers the scenario where a number of distinct, yet connected, computing devices (or parties) wish to carry out a joint computation of some function. For example, these devices may be servers who hold a distributed database system, and the function to be computed may be a database update of some kind. The aim of secure MPC is to enable parties to carry out such distributed computing ...