SaTC: CORE: Medium: Collaborative: New Approaches for Large Scale Secure Computation

George Mason University, Fairfax VA

Investigators

Abstract

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows multiple distrusting parties to perform joint computations on their data without exposing the data to one another. Due to their promising security guarantees, the cryptographic protocols for MPC have gained unprecedented exposure in the last decade. With the proliferation of large, distributed systems and computations such as Tor and blockchain, there is an urgent need for large-scale MPC to ensure security and privacy for these applications. However, large-scale applications pose some unique challenges for the design of MPC protocols. There are thousands of parties, often with unequal resources, and a small number of parties are likely to fail during a protocol execution. This project proposes to design MPC protocols to address these challenges. The project’s novelties are the design of new MPC protocols satisfying the requirements of large-scale distributed applications. Specifically, the investigators put forward a new framework for committee-based MPC for large-scale secure computations. These protocols distribute the computations across thousands of parallel committees to maximize the utilization of available resources for improved throughput. The designed protocols optimally choose committees and committee sub-protocols that optimize resource utilization and security. Additionally, they handle party failure and provide efficient oblivious access and search capabilities over data generated in these computations. The team of researchers combines techniques from prior work on secure computation (MPC) and oblivious data structures to simultaneously achieve all of these goals. The project’s impacts are to enable new classes of privacy-preserving computation, analytics, and applications geared to the needs of real-world distributed systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.