A formal treatment of the role of verified compilers in secure computation

First online 19 November 2021Secure multiparty computation (SMC) allows for complex computations over encrypted data. Privacy concerns for cloud applications makes this a highly desired technology and recent performance improvements show that it is practical. To make SMC accessible to non-experts and empower its use in varied applications, many domain-specific compilers are being proposed.We review the role of these compilers and provide a formal treatment of the core steps that they perform to bridge the abstraction gap between high-level ideal specifications and efficient SMC protocols. Our abstract framework bridges this secure compilation problem across two dimensions: 1) language-based source- to target-level semantic and efficiency gaps, and 2) cryptographic ideal- to real-world security gaps. We link the former to the setting of certified compilation, paving the way to leverage long-run efforts such as CompCert in future SMC compilers. Security is framed in the standard cryptographic sense. Our results are supported by a machine-checked formalisation carried out in EasyCrypt. (c) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.- Acknowledgements Jose Bacelar Almeida was partially funded by the PassCert project, a CMU Portugal Exploratory Project funded by Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT) , with reference CMU/TIC/0006/2019