Efficiently Enforcing Input Validity in Secure Two-party Computation

Secure two-party computation based on cut-and-choose has made great strides in recent years, with a significant reduction in the total number of garbled circuits required. Nevertheless, the overhead of cut-and-choose can still be significant for large circuits (i.e., a factor of $\rho$ in both communication and computation for statistical security $2^{-\rho}$). We show that for a particular class of computation it is possible to do better. Namely, consider the case where a function on the parties\u27 inputs is computed only if each party\u27s input satisfies some publicly checkable predicate (e.g., is signed by a third party, or lies in some desired domain). Using existing cut-and-choose-based protocols, both the predicate checks and the function would need to be garbled $\rho$ times. Here we show a protocol in which only the underlying function is garbled $\rho$ times, and the predicate checks are each garbled only \emph{once}. For certain natural examples (e.g., signature verification followed by evaluation of a million-gate circuit), this can lead to huge savings in communication (up to 80$\times$) and computation (up to 56$\times$). We provide detailed estimates using realistic examples to validate our claims

Oblivion: Mitigating Privacy Leaks by Controlling the Discoverability of Online Information

Search engines are the prevalently used tools to collect information about individuals on the Internet. Search results typically comprise a variety of sources that contain personal information -- either intentionally released by the person herself, or unintentionally leaked or published by third parties, often with detrimental effects on the individual's privacy. To grant individuals the ability to regain control over their disseminated personal information, the European Court of Justice recently ruled that EU citizens have a right to be forgotten in the sense that indexing systems, must offer them technical means to request removal of links from search results that point to sources violating their data protection rights. As of now, these technical means consist of a web form that requires a user to manually identify all relevant links upfront and to insert them into the web form, followed by a manual evaluation by employees of the indexing system to assess if the request is eligible and lawful. We propose a universal framework Oblivion to support the automation of the right to be forgotten in a scalable, provable and privacy-preserving manner. First, Oblivion enables a user to automatically find and tag her disseminated personal information using natural language processing and image recognition techniques and file a request in a privacy-preserving manner. Second, Oblivion provides indexing systems with an automated and provable eligibility mechanism, asserting that the author of a request is indeed affected by an online resource. The automated ligibility proof ensures censorship-resistance so that only legitimately affected individuals can request the removal of corresponding links from search results. We have conducted comprehensive evaluations, showing that Oblivion is capable of handling 278 removal requests per second, and is hence suitable for large-scale deployment

Raziel: Private and Verifiable Smart Contracts on Blockchains

Raziel combines secure multi-party computation and proof-carrying code to provide privacy, correctness and verifiability guarantees for smart contracts on blockchains. Effectively solving DAO and Gyges attacks, this paper describes an implementation and presents examples to demonstrate its practical viability (e.g., private and verifiable crowdfundings and investment funds). Additionally, we show how to use Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Proofs (i.e., Proof-Carrying Code certificates) to prove the validity of smart contracts to third parties before their execution without revealing anything else. Finally, we show how miners could get rewarded for generating pre-processing data for secure multi-party computation.Comment: Support: cothority/ByzCoin/OmniLedge