Oblivious Linear Evaluation (OLE) is an algebraic generalization of oblivious transfer (OT) that forms a critical part of a growing number of applications. An OLE protocol over a modulus q enables the receiver party to securely evaluate a line a⋅ X+b chosen by the sender party on a secret point x∈ ℤq. Motivated by the big efficiency gap between OLE and OT and by fast OT extension techniques, we revisit the question of reducing OLE to OT, aiming to improve the communication cost of known reductions.

Multi-Party Computation (MPC) has become a major tool for protecting hundreds of billions of dollars in cryptocurrency wallets. MPC protocols are currently powering the wallets of Coinbase, Binance, Zengo, BitGo, Fireblocks and many other fintech companies servicing thousands of financial institutions and hundreds of millions of end-user consumers.

We prove lower bounds on the round complexity of randomized Byzantine agreement (BA) protocols, bounding the halting probability of such protocols after one and two rounds. In particular, we prove that: 1. BA protocols resilient against n/3 [resp., n/4] corruptions terminate (under attack) at the end of the first round with probability at most o(1) [resp., $$1/2+ o(1)$$ ]. 2. BA protocols resilient against a fraction of corruptions greater than 1/4 terminate at the end of the second round with probability at most $$1-\Theta (1)$$ . 3. For a large class of protocols (including all BA protocols used in practice) and under a plausible combinatorial conjecture, BA protocols resilient against a fraction of corruptions greater than 1/3 [resp., 1/4] terminate at the end of the second round with probability at most o(1) [resp., $$1/2 + o(1)$$ ]. The above bounds hold even when the parties use a trusted setup phase, e.g., a public-key infrastructure (PKI). The third bound essentially matches the recent protocol of Micali (ITCS’17) that tolerates up to n/3 corruptions and terminates at the end of the third round with constant probability.

In his seminal work, Cleve [ Proceedings of the 18th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, 1986, pp. 364--369] has proved that any $r$-round coin-flipping protocol can be efficiently biased by $\Theta(1/r)$. This lower bound was met for the two-party case by Moran, Naor, and Segev [ J. Cryptology, 29 (2016), pp. 491--513] and the three-party case (up to a ${polylog}$ factor) by Haitner and Tsfadia [ SIAM J. Comput., 46 (2017), pp. 479--542] and was approached for $n$-party protocols when $n< {loglog} r$ by Buchbinder et al. [ Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, 2017, pp. 2580--2600]. For $n > {loglog} r$, however, the best bias for $n$-party coin-flipping protocols remains $O(n/\sqrt{r})$ achieved by the majority protocol of Awerbuch et al. [ How to implement Bracha's ${O}(\log n)$ Byzantine Agreement Algorithm, manuscript, 1985]. Our main result is a tighter lower bound on the bias of coin-flipping protocols, showing that, for every constant $\varepsilon >0$, an $r^{\varepsilon}$-party $r$-round coin-flipping protocol can be efficiently biased by $\widetilde{\Omega}(1/\sqrt{r})$. As far as we know, this is the first improvement of Cleve's bound and is only $n=r^{\varepsilon}$ (multiplicative) far from the aforementioned upper bound of Awerbuch et al. We prove the above bound using two new results that we believe are of independent interest. The first result is that a sequence of (``augmented'') weak martingales have large gap: with constant probability there exists two adjacent variables whose gap is at least the ratio between the gap between the first and last variables and the square root of the number of variables. This generalizes over the result of Cleve and Impagliazzo [ Martingales, Collective Coin Flipping and Discrete Control Processes (Extended Abstract), http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.51.1797, 1993], who showed that the above holds for strong martingales, and allows in some setting to exploit this gap by efficient algorithms. We prove the above using a novel argument that does not follow the more complicated approach of R. Cleve and R. Impagliazzo. The second result is a new sampling algorithm that uses a differentially private mechanism to minimize the effect of data divergence.

Building on the Gennaro & Goldfeder and Lindell & Nof protocols (CCS '18), we present two threshold ECDSA protocols, for any number of signatories and any threshold, that improve as follows over the state of the art: -- For both protocols, only the last round requires knowledge of the message, and the other rounds can take place in a preprocessing stage, lending to a non-interactive threshold ECDSA protocol. -- Both protocols withstand adaptive corruption of signatories. Furthermore, they include a periodic refresh mechanism and offer full proactive security. -- Both protocols realize an ideal threshold signature functionality within the UC framework, in the global random oracle model, assuming Strong RSA, DDH, semantic security of the Paillier encryption, and a somewhat enhanced variant of existential unforgeability of ECDSA. -- Both protocols achieve accountability by identifying corrupted parties in case of failure to generate a valid signature. The two protocols are distinguished by the round-complexity and the identification process for detecting cheating parties. Namely: -- For the first protocol, signature generation takes only 4 rounds (down from the current state of the art of 8 rounds), but the identification process requires computation and communication that is quadratic in the number of parties. -- For the second protocol, the identification process requires computation and communication that is only linear in the number of parties, but signature generation takes 7 rounds. These properties (low latency, compatibility with cold-wallet architectures, proactive security, identifiable abort and composable security) make the two protocols ideal for threshold wallets for ECDSA-based cryptocurrencies.

In his seminal work, Cleve [STOC '86] proved that the bias of any coin-flipping protocol is inversely proportional to the number of rounds. This lower bound was met for the two-party case by Moran et al. [Journal of Cryptology '16], and the three-party case (up to a polylogarithmic factor) by Haitner and Tsfadia [SICOMP '17], and was approached for multi-party protocols by Haitner et al. [SODA '17] when the number of rounds is at least doubly exponential in the number of parties. For the complement case, however, the best bias for multi-party coin-flipping protocols is proportional to the number of parties and inversely proportional to the square root of the number of rounds. The latter bias is achieved by the majority protocol of Awerbuch et al. [Manuscript '85]. Our main result is a tighter lower bound on the bias of coin-flipping protocols, showing that, if the number of rounds is bounded by some polynomial in the number of parties, then the bias is lower-bounded by a quantity that is inversely proportional to the square root of the number of rounds (up to a polylogarithmic factor). As far as we know, this is the first improvement of Cleve's bound, and is far from the aforementioned upper bound of Awerbuch et al. only by a factor of the number of parties. We prove the above bound using two new results that we believe are of independent interest. The first result is that a sequence of ("augmented") weak martingales have large gap: with constant probability there exists two adjacent variables whose gap is at least the ratio between the gap between the first and last variables and the square root of the number of variables. This generalizes over the result of Cleve and Impagliazzo [Manuscript '93], who showed that the above holds for strong martingales, and allows in some setting to exploit this gap by efficient algorithms. We prove the above using a novel argument that does not follow the more complicated approach of Cleve and Impagliazzo. The second result is a new sampling algorithm that uses a differentially private mechanism to minimize the effect of data divergence.

Given a code C ∈ F2nand a word c ∈ C, a witness of c is a subset W ⊆ {, 1..., n} of coordinate positions such that c differs from any other codeword c' ∈ C on the indices in W. If any codeword posseses a witness of given length w, C is called a w-witness code. This paper gives new constructions of large w-witness codes and proves with a numerical method that their sizes are maximal for certain values of n and w. Our technique is in the spirit of Delsarte's linear programming bound on the size of classical codes and relies on the Lovász theta number, semidefinite programming, and reduction through symmetry.