Efficiently Making Secure Two-Party Computation Fair

Secure two-party computation cannot be fair against malicious adversaries, unless a trusted third party (TTP) or a gradual-release type super-constant round protocol is employed. Existing optimistic fair two-party computation protocols with constant rounds are either too costly to arbitrate (e.g., the TTP may need to re-do almost the whole computation), or require the use of electronic payments. Furthermore, most of the existing solutions were proven secure and fair via a partial simulation, which, we show, may lead to insecurity overall. We propose a new framework for fair and secure two-party computation that can be applied on top of any secure two party computation protocol based on Yao's garbled circuits and zero-knowledge proofs. We show that our fairness overhead is minimal, compared to all known existing work. Furthermore, our protocol is fair even in terms of the work performed by Alice and Bob. We also prove our protocol is fair and secure simultaneously, through one simulator, which guarantees that our fairness extensions do not leak any private information. Lastly, we ensure that the TTP never learns the inputs or outputs of the computation. Therefore, even if the TTP becomes malicious and causes unfairness by colluding with one party, the security of the underlying protocol is still preserved

Fast Optimistically Fair Cut-and-Choose 2PC

Secure two party computation (2PC) is a well-studied problem with many real world applications. Due to Cleve\u27s result on general impossibility of fairness, however, the state-of-the-art solutions only provide security with abort. We investigate fairness for 2PC in presence of a trusted Arbiter, in an optimistic setting where the Arbiter is not involved if the parties act fairly. Existing fair solutions in this setting are by far less efficient than the fastest unfair 2PC. We close this efficiency gap by designing protocols for fair 2PC with covert and malicious security that have competitive performance with the state-of-the-art unfair constructions. In particular, our protocols only requires the exchange of a few extra messages with sizes that only depend on the output length; the Arbiter\u27s load is independent of the computation size; and a malicious Arbiter can only break fairness, but not covert/malicious security even if he colludes with a party. Finally, our solutions are designed to work with the state-of-the-art optimizations applicable to garbled circuits and cut-and-choose 2PC such as free-XOR, half-gates, and the cheating-recovery paradigm

Optimally Efficient Multi-Party Fair Exchange and Fair Secure Multi-Party Computation

Multi-party fair exchange (MFE) and fair secure multi-party computation (fair SMPC) are is under-studied field of research, with practical importance. In particular, we consider MFE scenarios where at the end of the protocol, either every participant receives every other participant’s item, or no participant receives anything. We analyze the case where a trusted third party (TTP) is optimistically available, although we emphasize that the trust put on the TTP is only regarding the fairness, and our protocols preserve the privacy of the exchanged items against the TTP. In the fair SMPC case, we prove that a malicious TTP can only harm fairness, but not security. We construct two asymptotically optimal multi-party fair exchange protocols that require a constant number of rounds (in comparison to linear) and O(n^2) messages (in comparison to cubic), where n is the number of participating parties. In one protocol, we enable the parties to efficiently exchange any item that can be efficiently put into a verifiable encryption (e.g., signatures on a contract). We show how to apply this protocol on top of any SMPC protocol to achieve fairness with very little overhead (independent of the circuit size), especially if the SMPC protocol works with arithmetic circuits. In our other protocol, we let the parties exchange any verifiable item, without the constraint that it must be efficiently put into a verifiable encryption (e.g., a file cannot be efficiently verifiably encrypted, but if its hash is known, once obtained, the file can be verified). We achieve this via the use of electronic payments, where if an item is not obtained, the payment of its owner will be obtained in return of the item that is sent. We then generalize our protocols to efficiently handle any exchange topology (participants exchange items with arbitrary other participants). Our protocols guarantee fairness in its strongest sense: even if all n-1 other participants are malicious and colluding with each other, the fairness is still guaranteed

New Applications Of Public Ledgers

The last decade and a half has seen the rise of a new class of systems loosely categorized as public ledgers. Public ledgers guarantee that all posted information is permanently available to the entire public. Common realizations of public ledgers include public blockchains and centralized logs. In this work we investigate novel applications of public ledgers. We begin by describing enclave ledger interaction, a computational method that allows the execution of trusted execution environments or cryptographically obfuscated programs to be conditioned on the contents of the ledger. We then show how this conditional execution paradigm can be used to achieve fairness in dishonest majority secure multiparty computation, which is impossible in the plain model. Finally, we show how conditional execution can be used to build systems that facilitate law enforcement access to ciphertext while ensuring robust transparency and accountability mechanisms