Trade-Offs in Distributed Interactive Proofs

The study of interactive proofs in the context of distributed network computing is a novel topic, recently introduced by Kol, Oshman, and Saxena [PODC 2018]. In the spirit of sequential interactive proofs theory, we study the power of distributed interactive proofs. This is achieved via a series of results establishing trade-offs between various parameters impacting the power of interactive proofs, including the number of interactions, the certificate size, the communication complexity, and the form of randomness used. Our results also connect distributed interactive proofs with the established field of distributed verification. In general, our results contribute to providing structure to the landscape of distributed interactive proofs

Sketching Cuts in Graphs and Hypergraphs

Sketching and streaming algorithms are in the forefront of current research directions for cut problems in graphs. In the streaming model, we show that $(1-\epsilon)$-approximation for Max-Cut must use $n^{1-O(\epsilon)}$ space; moreover, beating $4/5$-approximation requires polynomial space. For the sketching model, we show that $r$-uniform hypergraphs admit a $(1+\epsilon)$-cut-sparsifier (i.e., a weighted subhypergraph that approximately preserves all the cuts) with $O(\epsilon^{-2} n (r+\log n))$ edges. We also make first steps towards sketching general CSPs (Constraint Satisfaction Problems)

Ad Hoc Multi-Input Functional Encryption

Consider sources that supply sensitive data to an aggregator. Standard encryption only hides the data from eavesdroppers, but using specialized encryption one can hope to hide the data (to the extent possible) from the aggregator itself. For flexibility and security, we envision schemes that allow sources to supply encrypted data, such that at any point a dynamically-chosen subset of sources can allow an agreed-upon joint function of their data to be computed by the aggregator. A primitive called multi-input functional encryption (MIFE), due to Goldwasser et al. (EUROCRYPT 2014), comes close, but has two main limitations: - it requires trust in a third party, who is able to decrypt all the data, and - it requires function arity to be fixed at setup time and to be equal to the number of parties. To drop these limitations, we introduce a new notion of ad hoc MIFE. In our setting, each source generates its own public key and issues individual, function-specific secret keys to an aggregator. For successful decryption, an aggregator must obtain a separate key from each source whose ciphertext is being computed upon. The aggregator could obtain multiple such secret-keys from a user corresponding to functions of varying arity. For this primitive, we obtain the following results: - We show that standard MIFE for general functions can be bootstrapped to ad hoc MIFE for free, i.e. without making any additional assumption. - We provide a direct construction of ad hoc MIFE for the inner product functionality based on the Learning with Errors (LWE) assumption. This yields the first construction of this natural primitive based on a standard assumption. At a technical level, our results are obtained by combining standard MIFE schemes and two-round secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols in novel ways highlighting an interesting interplay between MIFE and two-round MPC

Efficient UC Commitment Extension with Homomorphism for Free (and Applications)

Homomorphic universally composable (UC) commitments allow for the sender to reveal the result of additions and multiplications of values contained in commitments without revealing the values themselves while assuring the receiver of the correctness of such computation on committed values. In this work, we construct essentially optimal additively homomorphic UC commitments from any (not necessarily UC or homomorphic) extractable commitment. We obtain amortized linear computational complexity in the length of the input messages and rate 1. Next, we show how to extend our scheme to also obtain multiplicative homomorphism at the cost of asymptotic optimality but retaining low concrete complexity for practical parameters. While the previously best constructions use UC oblivious transfer as the main building block, our constructions only require extractable commitments and PRGs, achieving better concrete efficiency and offering new insights into the sufficient conditions for obtaining homomorphic UC commitments. Moreover, our techniques yield public coin protocols, which are compatible with the Fiat-Shamir heuristic. These results come at the cost of realizing a restricted version of the homomorphic commitment functionality where the sender is allowed to perform any number of commitments and operations on committed messages but is only allowed to perform a single batch opening of a number of commitments. Although this functionality seems restrictive, we show that it can be used as a building block for more efficient instantiations of recent protocols for secure multiparty computation and zero knowledge non-interactive arguments of knowledge

Dependability in Aggregation by Averaging

Aggregation is an important building block of modern distributed applications, allowing the determination of meaningful properties (e.g. network size, total storage capacity, average load, majorities, etc.) that are used to direct the execution of the system. However, the majority of the existing aggregation algorithms exhibit relevant dependability issues, when prospecting their use in real application environments. In this paper, we reveal some dependability issues of aggregation algorithms based on iterative averaging techniques, giving some directions to solve them. This class of algorithms is considered robust (when compared to common tree-based approaches), being independent from the used routing topology and providing an aggregation result at all nodes. However, their robustness is strongly challenged and their correctness often compromised, when changing the assumptions of their working environment to more realistic ones. The correctness of this class of algorithms relies on the maintenance of a fundamental invariant, commonly designated as "mass conservation". We will argue that this main invariant is often broken in practical settings, and that additional mechanisms and modifications are required to maintain it, incurring in some degradation of the algorithms performance. In particular, we discuss the behavior of three representative algorithms Push-Sum Protocol, Push-Pull Gossip protocol and Distributed Random Grouping under asynchronous and faulty (with message loss and node crashes) environments. More specifically, we propose and evaluate two new versions of the Push-Pull Gossip protocol, which solve its message interleaving problem (evidenced even in a synchronous operation mode).Comment: 14 pages. Presented in Inforum 200

The Role of Interactivity in Local Differential Privacy

We study the power of interactivity in local differential privacy. First, we focus on the difference between fully interactive and sequentially interactive protocols. Sequentially interactive protocols may query users adaptively in sequence, but they cannot return to previously queried users. The vast majority of existing lower bounds for local differential privacy apply only to sequentially interactive protocols, and before this paper it was not known whether fully interactive protocols were more powerful. We resolve this question. First, we classify locally private protocols by their compositionality, the multiplicative factor $k \geq 1$ by which the sum of a protocol's single-round privacy parameters exceeds its overall privacy guarantee. We then show how to efficiently transform any fully interactive $k$-compositional protocol into an equivalent sequentially interactive protocol with an $O(k)$ blowup in sample complexity. Next, we show that our reduction is tight by exhibiting a family of problems such that for any $k$, there is a fully interactive $k$-compositional protocol which solves the problem, while no sequentially interactive protocol can solve the problem without at least an $\tilde \Omega(k)$ factor more examples. We then turn our attention to hypothesis testing problems. We show that for a large class of compound hypothesis testing problems --- which include all simple hypothesis testing problems as a special case --- a simple noninteractive test is optimal among the class of all (possibly fully interactive) tests

A Quantum-Proof Non-Malleable Extractor, With Application to Privacy Amplification against Active Quantum Adversaries

In privacy amplification, two mutually trusted parties aim to amplify the secrecy of an initial shared secret $X$ in order to establish a shared private key $K$ by exchanging messages over an insecure communication channel. If the channel is authenticated the task can be solved in a single round of communication using a strong randomness extractor; choosing a quantum-proof extractor allows one to establish security against quantum adversaries. In the case that the channel is not authenticated, Dodis and Wichs (STOC'09) showed that the problem can be solved in two rounds of communication using a non-malleable extractor, a stronger pseudo-random construction than a strong extractor. We give the first construction of a non-malleable extractor that is secure against quantum adversaries. The extractor is based on a construction by Li (FOCS'12), and is able to extract from source of min-entropy rates larger than $1/2$. Combining this construction with a quantum-proof variant of the reduction of Dodis and Wichs, shown by Cohen and Vidick (unpublished), we obtain the first privacy amplification protocol secure against active quantum adversaries