How to Recover a Secret with O(n) Additions

Threshold cryptography is typically based on the idea of secret-sharing a private-key $s\in F$ ``in the exponent\u27\u27 of some cryptographic group $G$, or more generally, encoding $s$ in some linearly homomorphic domain. In each invocation of the threshold system (e.g., for signing or decrypting) an ``encoding\u27\u27 of the secret is being recovered and so the complexity, measured as the number of group multiplications over $G$, is equal to the number of $F$-additions that are needed to reconstruct the secret. Motivated by this scenario, we initiate the study of $n$-party secret-sharing schemes whose reconstruction algorithm makes a minimal number of \emph{additions}. The complexity of existing schemes either scales linearly with $n\log |F|$ (e.g., Shamir, CACM\u2779) or, at least, quadratically with $n$ independently of the size of the domain $F$ (e.g., Cramer-Xing, EUROCRYPT \u2720). This leaves open the existence of a secret sharing whose recovery algorithm can be computed by performing only $O(n)$ additions. We resolve the question in the affirmative and present such a near-threshold secret sharing scheme that provides privacy against unauthorized sets of density at most $\tau_p$, and correctness for authorized sets of density at least $\tau_c$, for any given arbitrarily close constants $\tau_p<\tau_c$. Reconstruction can be computed by making at most $O(n)$ additions and, in addition, (1) the share size is constant, (2) the sharing procedure also makes only $O(n)$ additions, and (3) the scheme is a blackbox secret-sharing scheme, i.e., the sharing and reconstruction algorithms work universally for all finite abelian groups $F$. Prior to our work, no such scheme was known even without features (1)--(3) and even for the ramp setting where $\tau_p$ and $\tau_c$ are far apart. As a by-product, we derive the first blackbox near-threshold secret-sharing scheme with linear-time sharing. We also present several concrete instantiations of our approach that seem practically efficient (e.g., for threshold discrete-log-based signatures). Our constructions are combinatorial in nature. We combine graph-based erasure codes that support ``peeling-based\u27\u27 decoding with a new randomness extraction method that is based on inner-product with a small-integer vector. We also introduce a general concatenation-like transform for secret-sharing schemes that allows us to arbitrarily shrink the privacy-correctness gap with a minor overhead. Our techniques enrich the secret-sharing toolbox and, in the context of blackbox secret sharing, provide a new alternative to existing number-theoretic approaches

Secure Two-Party Computation via Cut-and-Choose Oblivious Transfer

Protocols for secure two-party computation enable a pair of parties to compute a function of their inputs while preserving security properties such as privacy, correctness and independence of inputs. Recently, a number of protocols have been proposed for the efficient construction of two-party computation secure in the presence of malicious adversaries (where security is proven under the standard simulation-based ideal/real model paradigm for defining security). In this paper, we present a protocol for this task that follows the methodology of using cut-and-choose to boost Yao\u27s protocol to be secure in the presence of malicious adversaries. Relying on specific assumptions (DDH), we construct a protocol that is significantly more efficient and far simpler than the protocol of Lindell and Pinkas (Eurocrypt 2007) that follows the same methodology. We provide an exact, concrete analysis of the efficiency of our scheme and demonstrate that (at least for not very small circuits) our protocol is more efficient than any other known today

An Efficient Protocol for Secure Two-Party Computation in the Presence of Malicious Adversaries

We show an efficient secure two-party protocol, based on Yao\u27s construction, which provides security against malicious adversaries. Yao\u27s original protocol is only secure in the presence of semi-honest adversaries, and can be transformed into a protocol that achieves security against malicious adversaries by applying the compiler of Goldreich, Micali and Wigderson (the ``GMW compiler\u27\u27). However, this approach does not seem to be very practical as it requires using generic zero-knowledge proofs. Our construction is based on applying cut-and-choose techniques to the original circuit and inputs. Security is proved according to the {\sf ideal/real simulation paradigm}, and the proof is in the standard model (with no random oracle model or common reference string assumptions). The resulting protocol is computationally efficient: the only usage of asymmetric cryptography is for running $O(1)$ oblivious transfers for each input bit (or for each bit of a statistical security parameter, whichever is larger). Our protocol combines techniques from folklore (like cut-and-choose) along with new techniques for efficiently proving consistency of inputs. We remark that a naive implementation of the cut-and-choose technique with Yao\u27s protocol does \emph{not} yield a secure protocol. This is the first paper to show how to properly implement these techniques, and to provide a full proof of security. Our protocol can also be interpreted as a constant-round black-box reduction of secure two-party computation to oblivious transfer and perfectly-hiding commitments, or a black-box reduction of secure two-party computation to oblivious transfer alone, with a number of rounds which is linear in a statistical security parameter. These two reductions are comparable to Kilian\u27s reduction, which uses OT alone but incurs a number of rounds which is linear in the depth of the circuit~\cite{Kil}

A Simple Recursive Tree Oblivious RAM

Oblivious RAM (ORAM) has received increasing attention in the past few years. The goal of oblivious RAM is to enable a client, that can locally store only a small (preferably constant) amount of data, to store remotely N data items, and access them while hiding the identities of the items that are being accessed. Most of the earlier ORAM constructions were based on the hierarchical data structure of Goldreich and Ostrovsky. Shi et al. introduced a binary tree ORAM, which is simpler and more efficient than the classical hierarchical ORAM. Gentry et al. have improved the scheme. In this work, we improve these two constructions. Our scheme asymptotically outperforms all previous tree based ORAM schemes that have constant client memory, with an overhead of O(log^{2+eps}(N) * log^2(log(N))) per operation for a O(N) storage server. Although the best known asymptotic result for ORAM is due to the hierarchical structure of Kushilevitz et al. (O(log^2(N)/log(log(N)))), tree based ORAM constructions are much simple

Peer-to-Peer Secure Multi-Party Numerical Computation

We propose an efficient framework for enabling secure multi-party numerical computations in a Peer-to-Peer network. This problem arises in a range of applications such as collaborative filtering, distributed computation of trust and reputation, monitoring and numerous other tasks, where the computing nodes would like to preserve the privacy of their inputs while performing a joint computation of a certain function. Although there is a rich literature in the field of distributed systems security concerning secure multi-party computation, in practice it is hard to deploy those methods in very large scale Peer-to-Peer networks. In this work, we examine several possible approaches and discuss their feasibility. Among the possible approaches, we identify a single approach which is both scalable and theoretically secure. An additional novel contribution is that we show how to compute the neighborhood based collaborative filtering, a state-of-the-art collaborative filtering algorithm, winner of the Netflix progress prize of the year 2007. Our solution computes this algorithm in a Peer-to-Peer network, using a privacy preserving computation, without loss of accuracy. Using extensive large scale simulations on top of real Internet topologies, we demonstrate the applicability of our approach. As far as we know, we are the first to implement such a large scale secure multi-party simulation of networks of millions of nodes and hundreds of millions of edges.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, appeared in the 8th IEEE Peer-to-Peer Computing, Aachen, Germany, Sept. 200

Efficient Constant-Round Multi-party Computation Combining BMR and SPDZ

© 2019, International Association for Cryptologic Research. Recently, there has been huge progress in the field of concretely efficient secure computation, even while providing security in the presence of malicious adversaries. This is especially the case in the two-party setting, where constant-round protocols exist that remain fast even over slow networks. However, in the multi-party setting, all concretely efficient fully secure protocols, such as SPDZ, require many rounds of communication. In this paper, we present a constant-round multi-party secure computation protocol that is fully secure in the presence of malicious adversaries and for any number of corrupted parties. Our construction is based on the constant-round protocol of Beaver et al. (the BMR protocol) and is the first version of that protocol that is concretely efficient for the dishonest majority case. Our protocol includes an online phase that is extremely fast and mainly consists of each party locally evaluating a garbled circuit. For the offline phase, we present both a generic construction (using any underlying MPC protocol) and a highly efficient instantiation based on the SPDZ protocol. Our estimates show the protocol to be considerably more efficient than previous fully secure multi-party protocols.status: publishe

Secure Deduplication of Encrypted Data without Additional Independent Servers

Encrypting data on client-side before uploading it to a cloud storage is essential for protecting users\u27 privacy. However client-side encryption is at odds with the standard practice of deduplication. Reconciling client-side encryption with cross-user deduplication is an active research topic. We present the first secure cross-user deduplication scheme that supports client-side encryption {\em without requiring any additional independent servers}. Interestingly, the scheme is based on using a PAKE (password authenticated key exchange) protocol. We demonstrate that {\em our scheme provides better security guarantees than previous efforts}. We show both the effectiveness and the efficiency of our scheme, via simulations using realistic datasets and an implementation