Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) protocols that achieve Identifiable Abort (IA) guarantee honest parties that if they are denied output, they will be notified of the identity of at least one corrupt party. Cheater identification provides recourse in the event of a protocol failure, and in some settings---such as key management---can even be desired over Guaranteed Output Delivery. However, unlike the weaker security with abort setting, IA protocols make integral use of a broadcast channel.

Secure multiparty computation (MPC) enables privacy-preserving collaborative computation over sensitive data held by multiple mutually distrusting parties. Unfortunately, in the most natural setting where a majority of the parties are maliciously corrupt (also called the dishonest majority setting), traditional MPC protocols incur high overheads and offer weaker security guarantees than are desirable for practical applications. In this paper, we explore the possibility of circumventing these drawbacks and achieving practically efficient dishonest majority MPC protocols with strong security guarantees by assuming an additional semi-honest, non-colluding helper party HP .1We believe that this is a more realistic alternative to assuming an honest majority, since many real-world applications of MPC involving potentially large numbers of parties (such as dark pools) are typically enabled by a central governing entity that can be modeled as the HP.In the above model, we are the first to design, implement and benchmark a practically-efficient and general multi-party framework, Asterisk. Our framework requires invoking HP only a constant number of times, achieves the strong security guarantee of fairness (either all parties learn the output or none do), scales to hundreds of parties, outperforms all existing dishonest majority MPC protocols, and is, in fact, competitive with state-of-the-art honest majority MPC protocols. Our experiments show that Asterisk achieves 228 – 288× speedup in preprocessing as compared to the best dishonest majority MPC protocol. With respect to online time, Asterisk supports 100-party evaluation of a circuit with 106multiplication gates in approximately 20 seconds. We also implement and benchmark practically efficient and highly scalable dark pool instances using Asterisk. The corresponding run times showcase the effectiveness of Asterisk in enabling efficient realizations of real-world privacy-preserving applications with strong security guarantees.

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) protocols that are resilient to a dishonest majority allow the adversary to get the output of the computation while, at the same time, forcing the honest parties to abort. Aumann and Lindell introduced the enhanced notion of security with identifiable abort , which still allows the adversary to trigger an abort but, at the same time, it enables the honest parties to agree on the identity of the party that led to the abort. More recently, in Eurocrypt 2016, Garg et al. showed that, assuming access to a simultaneous message exchange channel for all the parties, at least four rounds of communication are required to securely realize non-trivial functionalities in the plain model. Following Garg et al., a sequence of works has matched this lower bound, but none of them achieved security with identifiable abort. In this work, we close this gap and show that four rounds of communication are also sufficient to securely realize any functionality with identifiable abort using standard and generic polynomial-time assumptions. To achieve this result we introduce the new notion of bounded-rewind secure MPC that guarantees security even against an adversary that performs a mild form of reset attacks. We show how to instantiate this primitive starting from any MPC protocol and by assuming trapdoor-permutations. The notion of bounded-rewind secure MPC allows for easier parallel composition of MPC protocols with other (interactive) cryptographic primitives. Therefore, we believe that this primitive can be useful in other contexts in which it is crucial to combine multiple primitives with MPC protocols while keeping the round complexity of the final protocol low.

Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) with small number of parties is an interesting area of research, primarily due to its ability to model most real-life MPC applications and the simplicity and efficiency of the resulting protocols. In this work, we present efficient, constant-round 3-party (3PC) and 4-party (4PC) protocols in the honest-majority setting that achieve strong security notions of fairness (corrupted parties receive their output only if all honest parties receive output) and guaranteed output delivery (corrupted parties cannot prevent honest parties from receiving their output). Being constant-round, our constructions are suitable for Internet-like high-latency networks and are built from garbled circuits (GC). Assuming the minimal model of pairwise-private channels, we present two protocols that involve computation and communication of a single GC-- (a) a 4-round 3PC with fairness, (b) a 5-round 4PC with guaranteed output delivery. Empirically, our protocols are on par with the best known 3PC protocol of Mohassel et al. [CCS 2015] that only achieves security with selective abort, in terms of the computation time, LAN runtime, WAN runtime and communication cost. In fact, our 4PC outperforms the 3PC of Mohassel et al. significantly in terms of per-party computation and communication cost. With an extra GC, we improve the round complexity of our 4PC to four rounds. The only 4PC in our setting, given by Ishai et al. [CRYPTO 2015], involves 12 GCs. Assuming an additional broadcast channel, we present a 5-round 3PC with guaranteed output delivery that involves computation and communication of a single GC. A broadcast channel is inevitable in this setting for achieving guaranteed output delivery, owing to an impossibility result in the literature. The overall broadcast communication of our protocol is nominal and most importantly, is independent of the circuit size. This protocol too induces a nominal overhead compared to the protocol of Mohassel et al.

Perfectly-secure verifiable secret sharing (VSS) and multi-party computation (MPC) protocols in asynchronous network tolerate only at most one-fourth of corruption, while their counterparts in synchronous network sustain against at most one-third corruption. Moreover property-wise, synchronous protocols provide much stronger guarantees than the asynchronous counterparts. Taking note of the fact that asynchronous network is more realistic on one hand and on the other, synchrony of a network has positive impact on several aspects of distributed protocols including properties and fault-tolerance, we explore the power of hybrid networks that combines best of both the worlds by supporting a few synchronous rounds at the onset of a protocol execution, before turning to asynchronous mode. In hybrid networks, we investigate various feasibility questions pertaining to protocols giving guarantees attainable in synchronous and asynchronous networks. For the asynchronous protocols in hybrid networks, we hope to leverage the initial synchronous rounds to bridge the gap in the fault-tolerance with the synchronous protocols under minimal synchrony assumption. We ask the following fundamental question of both theoretical and practical importance: What is the minimum number of initial synchronous rounds necessary and sufficient in a hybrid network to construct asynchronous perfectly-secure VSS and MPC protocols with the fault-tolerance of synchronous protocols? On the positive note, we show that the answer is one for VSS which is clearly optimal. Notably no broadcast oracle is invoked in the synchronous round of our proposed VSS protocol. On the negative side, we prove that one synchronous round is not enough for MPC, putting MPC on a higher pedestal than VSS in terms of difficulty. For synchronous protocols in hybrid networks, we hope to save on the synchronous rounds leveraging conveniently the available asynchronous phase. We settle the question for VSS in the negative showing that three rounds that are known to be necessary (and sufficient) for VSS in synchronous networks, are also required in hybrid networks. VSS being a special case of MPC, the lower bound holds true for MPC. We match the lower bound with a three-round protocol. Notably, synchronous MPC with cryptographic security is known to be achievable in hybrid networks with one synchronous round.

We revisit the problem of distributed consensus in directed graphs tolerating crash failures; we improve the round and communication complexity of the existing protocols. Moreover, we prove that our protocol requires the optimal number of communication rounds, required by any protocol belonging to a specific class of crash-tolerant consensus protocols in directed graphs.