We construct protocols for oblivious pseudorandom functions (OPRFs) based on alternating moduli assumptions in the 'Crypto Dark Matter' paradigm (Boneh et al, TCC 2016). Prior OPRFs based on this type of assumption were only secure against a semi-honest adversary. We show how to obtain maliciously secure protocols, by leveraging new cut-and-choose techniques for generating correlated randomness based on vector oblivious linear evaluation (VOLE), which allow efficient conversions between different moduli in zero-knowledge and secure two-party computation. Compared with the state-of-the-art GOLD OPRF (Yang et al, S&P 2025), our construction has a faster online phase in all settings, as well as overall better efficiency in the small-batch setting. Furthermore, our construction supports obtaining a secret-shared output, and can be extended to handle secretshared inputs. This opens up additional applications in variants of private set intersection and secure database operations.

We propose efficient, post-quantum threshold ring signatures constructed from one-wayness of AES encryption and the VOLE-in-the-Head zero-knowledge proof system. Our scheme scales efficiently to large rings and extends the linkable ring signatures paradigm. We define and construct key-binding deterministic tags to achieve linkability. We then extend our threshold ring signatures to realize post-quantum anonymous ledger transactions in the spirit of Monero. Finally, our deterministic tags also enable succinct aggregation using approximate lower bound arguments of knowledge; this allows us to achieve succinct (approximate) multi-signatures without SNARKs. Our constructions assume symmetric key primitives only.

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) enables parties to compute a function over private inputs while maintaining confidentiality. Although MPC has advanced significantly and attracts a growing industry interest, open-source imple-mentations are still at an early stage, with no production-ready code and a poor understanding of their actual security guarantees. In this work, we study the real-world security of modern MPC implementations, focusing on the SPDZ protocol (Damgard et al., CRYPTO 2012, ESORICS 2013), which provides security against malicious adversaries when all-but-one of the participants may be corrupted. We identify a novel type of MAC key leakage in the MAC check protocol of SPDZ, which can be exploited in concurrent, multi-threaded settings, com-promising output integrity and, in some cases, input privacy. In our analysis of three SPDZ implementations (MP-SPDZ, SCALE-MAMBA, and FRESCO), two are vulnerable to this attack, while we also uncover further issues and vulnerabilities with all implementations. We propose mitigation strategies and some recommendations for researchers, developers and users, which we hope can bring more awareness to these issues and avoid them reoccurring in future.

One-round secure computation is generally believed impossible due to the residual function attack : any honest-but-curious participant can replay the protocol in their head changing their input, and learn, in this way, a new output. Inputless functionalities are among the few that are immune to this problem. This paper studies one-round, multi-party computation protocols (MPC) that implement the most natural inputless functionality: one that generates a random sample from a fixed distribution. These are called distributed samplers . At Eurocrypt 2022, Abram, Scholl and Yakoubov showed how to build this primitive in the semi-honest model with dishonest majority. In this work, we give a lower bound for constructing distributed samplers with a malicious adversary in the standard model. More in detail, we show that for any construction in the stand-alone model with black-box simulation, even with a CRS and honest majority, the output of the sampling protocol must have low entropy. This essentially implies that this type of construction is useless in applications. Our proof is based on an entropic argument, drawing a new connection between computationally secure MPC, information theory and learning theory.

We present a new method for transforming zero-knowledge protocols in the designated verifier setting into public-coin protocols, which can be made non-interactive and publicly verifiable. Our transformation applies to a large class of ZK protocols based on oblivious transfer. In particular, we show that it can be applied to recent, fast protocols based on vector oblivious linear evaluation (VOLE), with a technique we call VOLE-in-the-head, upgrading these protocols to support public verifiability. Our resulting ZK protocols have linear proof size, and are simpler, smaller and faster than related approaches based on MPC-in-the-head. To build VOLE-in-the-head while supporting both binary circuits and large finite fields, we develop several new technical tools. One of these is a new proof of security for the SoftSpokenOT protocol (Crypto 2022), which generalizes it to produce certain types of VOLE correlations over large fields. Secondly, we present a new ZK protocol that is tailored to take advantage of this form of VOLE, which leads to a publicly verifiable VOLE-in-the-head protocol with only 2x more communication than the best, designated-verifier VOLE-based protocols. We analyze the soundness of our approach when made non-interactive using the Fiat-Shamir transform, using round-by-round soundness. As an application of the resulting NIZK, we present $$\textsf{FAEST}$$ , a post-quantum signature scheme based on AES. FAEST is the first AES-based signature scheme to be smaller than SPHINCS+, with signature sizes between 5.6 and 6.6kB at the 128-bit security level. Compared with the smallest version of SPHINCS+ (7.9kB), FAEST verification is slower, but the signing times are between 8x and 40x faster.

Abstract A zero-knowledge proof is a cryptographic protocol where a prover can convince a verifier that a statement is true, without revealing any further information except for the truth of the statement. This article is a survey of recent developments in building practical zero-knowledge proof systems using vector oblivious linear evaluation (VOLE), a tool from secure two-party computation. In this work, we attempt to systematize the recent works on VOLE-based Zero-Knowledge proofs and make the state of the art accessible in one document.

Zero-Knowledge protocols have increasingly become both popular and practical in recent years due to their applicability in many areas such as blockchain systems. Unfortunately, public verifiability and small proof sizes of zero-knowledge protocols currently come at the price of strong assumptions, large prover time, or both, when considering statements with millions of gates. In this regime, the most prover-efficient protocols are in the designated verifier setting, where proofs are only valid to a single party that must keep a secret state.

Zero-knowledge proof systems are usually designed to support computations for circuits over $$\mathbb {F}_2$$ or $$\mathbb {F}_p$$ for large p, but not for computations over $$\mathbb {Z}_{2^k}$$ , which all modern CPUs operate on. Although $$\mathbb {Z}_{2^k}$$ -arithmetic can be emulated using prime moduli, this comes with an unavoidable overhead. Recently, Baum et al. (CCS 2021) suggested a candidate construction for a designated-verifier zero-knowledge proof system that natively runs over $$\mathbb {Z}_{2^k}$$ . Unfortunately, their construction requires preprocessed random vector oblivious linear evaluation (VOLE) to be instantiated over $$\mathbb {Z}_{2^k}$$ . Currently, it is not known how to efficiently generate such random VOLE in large quantities. In this work, we present a maliciously secure, VOLE extension protocol that can turn a short seed-VOLE over $$\mathbb {Z}_{2^k}$$ into a much longer, pseudorandom VOLE over the same ring. Our construction borrows ideas from recent protocols over finite fields, which we non-trivially adapt to work over $$\mathbb {Z}_{2^k}$$ . Moreover, we show that the approach taken by the QuickSilver zero-knowledge proof system (Yang et al. CCS 2021) can be generalized to support computations over $$\mathbb {Z}_{2^k}$$ . This new VOLE-based proof system, which we call QuarkSilver, yields better efficiency than the previous zero-knowledge protocols suggested by Baum et al. Furthermore, we implement both our VOLE extension and our zero-knowledge proof system, and show that they can generate 13–50 million VOLEs per second for $${64}\,{\textrm{bit}}$$ to $${256}\,{\textrm{bit}}$$ rings, and evaluate $${1.3}\,\textrm{million}$$ $${64}\,{\textrm{bit}}$$ multiplications per second in zero-knowledge.

A pseudorandom correlation generator (PCG) is a recent tool for securely generating useful sources of correlated randomness, such as random oblivious transfers (OT) and vector oblivious linear evaluations (VOLE), with low communication cost. We introduce a simple new design for PCGs based on so-called expand-accumulate codes, which first apply a sparse random expander graph to replicate each message entry, and then accumulate the entries by computing the sum of each prefix. Our design offers the following advantages compared to state-of-the-art PCG constructions: Competitive concrete efficiency backed by provable security against relevant classes of attacks; An offline-online mode that combines near-optimal cache-friendliness with simple parallelization; Concretely efficient extensions to pseudorandom correlation functions , which enable incremental generation of new correlation instances on demand, and to new kinds of correlated randomness that include circuit-dependent correlations. To further improve the concrete computational cost, we propose a method for speeding up a full-domain evaluation of a puncturable pseudorandom function (PPRF). This is independently motivated by other cryptographic applications of PPRFs.

Digital signature schemes are a fundamental component of secure distributed systems, and the theft of a signing-key might have huge real-world repercussions e.g., in applications such as cryptocurrencies. Threshold signature schemes mitigate this problem by distributing shares of the secret key on several servers and requiring that enough of them interact to be able to compute a signature. In this paper, we provide a novel threshold protocol for ECDSA, arguably the most relevant signature scheme in practice. Our protocol is the first one where the communication complexity of the preprocessing phase is only logarithmic in the number of ECDSA signatures to be produced later, and it achieves therefore a so-called silent preprocessing. Our protocol achieves active security against any number of arbitrarily corrupted parties.

An oblivious linear function evaluation protocol, or OLE, is a two-party protocol for the function f ( x ) = a x + b, where a sender inputs the field elements a, b, and a receiver inputs x and learns f ( x ). OLE can be used to build secret-shared multiplication, and is an essential component of many secure computation applications including general-purpose multi-party computation, private set intersection and more. In this work, we present several efficient OLE protocols from the ring learning with errors (RLWE) assumption. Technically, we build two new passively secure protocols, which build upon recent advances in homomorphic secret sharing from (R)LWE (Boyle et al. in: EUROCRYPT 2019, Part II (2019) 3–33 Springer), with optimizations tailored to the setting of OLE. We upgrade these to active security using efficient amortized zero-knowledge techniques for lattice relations (Baum et al. in: CRYPTO 2018, Part II (2018) 669–699 Springer), and design new variants of zero-knowledge arguments that are necessary for some of our constructions. Our protocols offer several advantages over existing constructions. Firstly, they have the lowest communication complexity amongst previous, practical protocols from RLWE and other assumptions; secondly, they are conceptually very simple, and have just one round of interaction for the case of OLE where b is randomly chosen. We demonstrate this with an implementation of one of our passively secure protocols, which can perform more than 1 million OLEs per second over the ring Z m , for a 120-bit modulus m, on standard hardware.

Zero-knowledge proofs are highly flexible cryptographic protocols that are an important building block for many secure systems. Typically, these are defined with respect to statements that are formulated as arithmetic operations over a fixed finite field. This inflexibility is a disadvantage when it comes to complex programs, as some fields are more amenable to express certain operations than others. At the same time, there do not seem to be many proofs with a programming model similar to those found in modern computer architectures that perform arithmetic with 32 or 64 bit integers.

We present a unified view of the two-party and multi-party computation protocols based on oblivious transfer first outlined in Nielsen et al. (CRYPTO 2012) and Larraia et al. (CRYPTO 2014). We present a number of modifications and improvements to these earlier presentations, as well as full proofs of the entire protocol. Improvements include a unified pre-processing and online MAC methodology, mechanisms to pass between different MAC variants and fixing a minor bug in the protocol of Larraia et al. in relation to a selective failure attack. It also fixes a minor bug in Nielsen et al. resulting from using Jensen’s inequality in the wrong direction in an analysis.

Correlated secret randomness is a useful resource for many cryptographic applications. We initiate the study of pseudorandom correlation functions (PCFs) that offer the ability to securely generate virtually unbounded sources of correlated randomness using only local computation. Concretely, a PCF is a keyed function Fk such that for a suitable joint key distribution ( k0, k1), the outputs (fk0(x), fk1(x)) are indistinguishable from instances of a given target correlation. An essential security requirement is that indistinguishability hold not only for outsiders, who observe the pairs of outputs, but also for insiders who know one of the two keys. We present efficient constructions of PCFs for a broad class of useful correlations, including oblivious transfer and multiplication triple correlations, from a variable-density variant of the Learning Parity with Noise assumption (VDLPN). We also present several cryptographic applications that motivate our efficient PCF constructions. The VDLPN assumption is independently motivated by two additional applications. First, different flavors of this assumption give rise to weak pseudorandom function candidates in depth-2 AC0[⊕] that can be conjectured to have subexponential security, matching the best known learning algorithms for this class. This is contrasted with the quasipolynomial security of previous (higher-depth) AC0[⊕] candidates. We support our conjectures by proving resilience to several classes of attacks. Second, VDLPN implies simple constructions of pseudorandom generators and weak pseudorandom functions with security against XOR related-key attacks.

In this work, we present two new actively secure, constant-round multi-party computation (MPC) protocols with security against all-but-one corruptions. Our protocols both start with an actively secure MPC protocol, which may have linear round complexity in the depth of the circuit, and compile it into a constant-round protocol based on garbled circuits, with very low overhead. Our first protocol takes a generic approach using any secret-sharing-based MPC protocol for binary circuits, and a correlated oblivious transfer functionality. Our second protocol builds on secret-sharing-based MPC with information-theoretic MACs. This approach is less flexible, being based on a specific form of MPC, but requires no additional oblivious transfers to compute the garbled circuit. In both approaches, the underlying secret-sharing-based protocol is only used for one actively secure \(\mathbb {F}_2\) multiplication per AND gate . An interesting consequence of this is that, with current techniques, constant-round MPC for binary circuits is not much more expensive than practical, non-constant-round protocols. We demonstrate the practicality of our second protocol with an implementation and perform experiments with up to 9 parties securely computing the AES and SHA-256 circuits. Our running times improve upon the best possible performance with previous protocols in this setting by 60 times.

We consider the problem of securely generating useful instances of two-party correlations, such as many independent copies of a random oblivious transfer (OT) correlation, using a small amount of communication. This problem is motivated by the goal of secure computation with silent preprocessing, where a low-communication input-independent setup, followed by local ("silent") computation, enables a lightweight "non-cryptographic" online phase once the inputs are known. Recent works of Boyle et al. (CCS 2018, Crypto 2019) achieve this goal with good concrete efficiency for useful kinds of two-party correlations, including OT correlations, under different variants of the Learning Parity with Noise (LPN) assumption, and using a small number of "base'' oblivious transfers. The protocols of Boyle et al. have several limitations. First, they require a large number of communication rounds. Second, they are only secure against semi-honest parties. Finally, their concrete efficiency estimates are not backed by an actual implementation. In this work we address these limitations, making three main contributions: Eliminating interaction. Under the same assumption, we obtain the first concretely efficient 2-round protocols for generating useful correlations, including OT correlations, in the semi-honest security model. This implies the first efficient 2-round OT extension protocol of any kind and, more generally, protocols for non-interactive secure computation (NISC) that are concretely efficient and have the silent preprocessing feature. Malicious security. We provide security against malicious parties without additional interaction and with only a modest overhead; prior to our work, no similar protocols were known with any number of rounds. Implementation. Finally, we implemented, optimized, and benchmarked our 2-round OT extension protocol, demonstrating that it offers a more attractive alternative to the OT extension protocol of Ishai et al. (Crypto 2003) in many realistic settings.

At CRYPTO 2018 Cramer et al. presented SPDZ2k , a new secret-sharing based protocol for actively secure multi-party computation against a dishonest majority, that works over rings instead of fields. Their protocol uses slightly more communication than competitive schemes working over fields. However, implementation-wise, their approach allows for arithmetic to be carried out using native 32 or 64-bit CPU operations rather than modulo a large prime. The authors thus conjectured that the increased communication would be more than made up for by the increased efficiency of implementations. In this work we answer their conjecture in the affirmative. We do so by implementing their scheme, and designing and implementing new efficient protocols for equality test, comparison, and truncation over rings. We further show that these operations find application in the machine learning domain, and indeed significantly outperform their field-based competitors. In particular, we implement and benchmark oblivious algorithms for decision tree and support vector machine (SVM) evaluation.

We present a new approach to designing concretely efficient MPC protocols with semi-honest security in the dishonest majority setting. Motivated by the fact that within the dishonest majority setting the efficiency of most practical protocols does not depend on the number of honest parties, we investigate how to construct protocols which improve in efficiency as the number of honest parties increases. Our central idea is to take a protocol which is secure for $$n-1$$ corruptions and modify it to use short symmetric keys, with the aim of basing security on the concatenation of all honest parties’ keys. This results in a more efficient protocol tolerating fewer corruptions, whilst also introducing an LPN-style syndrome decoding assumption. We first apply this technique to a modified version of the semi-honest GMW protocol, using OT extension with short keys, to improve the efficiency of standard GMW with fewer corruptions. We also obtain more efficient constant-round MPC, using BMR-style garbled circuits with short keys, and present an implementation of the online phase of this protocol. Our techniques start to improve upon existing protocols when there are around $$n=20$$ parties with $$h=6$$ honest parties, and as these increase we obtain up to a 13 times reduction (for $$n=400, h=120$$ ) in communication complexity for our GMW variant, compared with the best-known GMW-based protocol modified to use the same threshold.

We discuss the design of symmetric primitives, in particular Pseudo-Random Functions (PRFs) which are suitable for use in a secret-sharing based MPC system. We consider three different PRFs: the Naor-Reingold PRF, a PRF based on the Legendre symbol, and a specialized block cipher design called MiMC. We present protocols for implementing these PRFs within a secret-sharing based MPC system, and discuss possible applications. We then compare the performance of our protocols. Depending on the application, different PRFs may offer different optimizations and advantages over the classic AES benchmark. Thus, we cannot conclude that there is one optimal PRF to be used in all situations.

We consider the task of secure multi-party computation of arithmetic circuits over a finite field. Unlike Boolean circuits, arithmetic circuits allow natural computations on integers to be expressed easily and efficiently. In the strongest setting of malicious security with a dishonest majority --- where any number of parties may deviate arbitrarily from the protocol --- most existing protocols require expensive public-key cryptography for each multiplication in the preprocessing stage of the protocol, which leads to a high total cost. We present a new protocol that overcomes this limitation by using oblivious transfer to perform secure multiplications in general finite fields with reduced communication and computation. Our protocol is based on an arithmetic view of oblivious transfer, with careful consistency checks and other techniques to obtain malicious security at a cost of less than 6 times that of semi-honest security. We describe a highly optimized implementation together with experimental results for up to five parties. By making extensive use of parallelism and SSE instructions, we improve upon previous runtimes for MPC over arithmetic circuits by more than 200 times.

We present a runtime environment for executing secure programs via a multi-party computation protocol in the preprocessing model. The runtime environment is general and allows arbitrary reactive computations to be performed. A particularly novel aspect is that it automatically determines the minimum number of rounds needed for a computation, given a specific instruction sequence, and it then uses this to minimize the overall cost of the computation. Various experiments are reported on, on various non-trivial functionalities. We show how, by utilizing the ability of modern processors to execute multiple threads at a time, one can obtain various tradeoffs between latency and throughput

SPDZ (pronounced “Speedz”) is the nickname of the MPC protocol of Damgård et al. from Crypto 2012. In this paper we both resolve a number of open problems with SPDZ; and present several theoretical and practical improvements to the protocol. In detail, we start by designing and implementing a covertly secure key generation protocol for obtaining a BGV public key and a shared associated secret key. We then construct both a covertly and actively secure preprocessing phase, both of which compare favourably with previous work in terms of efficiency and provable security. We also build a new online phase, which solves a major problem of the SPDZ protocol: namely prior to this work preprocessed data could be used for only one function evaluation and then had to be recomputed from scratch for the next evaluation, while our online phase can support reactive functionalities. This improvement comes mainly from the fact that our construction does not require players to reveal the MAC keys to check correctness of MAC’d values. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.