Efficient Secure Computation with Garbled Circuits

Abstract

Abstract. Secure two-party computation enables applications in which participants compute the output of a function that depends on their private inputs, without revealing those inputs or relying on any trusted third party. In this paper, we show the potential of building privacy-preserving applications using garbled circuits, a generic technique that until recently was believed to be too inefficient to scale to realistic problems. We present a Java-based framework that uses pipelining and circuit-level optimizations to build efficient and scalable privacypreserving applications. Although the standard garbled circuit protocol assumes a very week, honest-but-curious adversary, techniques are available for converting such protocols to resist stronger adversaries, including fully malicious adversaries. We summarize approaches to producing malicious-resistant secure computations that reduce the costs of transforming a protocol to be secure against stronger adversaries. In addition, we summarize results on ensuring fairness, the property that either both parties receive the result or neither party does. Several open problems remain, but as theory and pragmatism advance, secure computation is approaching the point where it offers practical solutions for a wide variety of important problems.

Garbled Circuits Checking Garbled Circuits: More Efficient and Secure Two-Party Computation

“…We remark that our proposed solutions can be modified to work with any of the existing garbled-circuit optimization techniques of [14,5,25,6,15].…”

“…1 The above solution can be applied to most previous 2PC protocols based on cut-and-choose to obtain their two-output variants. But, since the circuit checking is done after the circuit evaluation, the above solution falls short when combined with circuit streaming or parallelized garbling techniques [6,15].…”

“…Furthermore, recent results show how to improve both the computation and communication cost of the garbling process (e.g., getting XOR gates for free [14], reducing communication [5,25], and designing tailored circuits [6]). …”

Efficient Three-Party Computation from Cut-and-Choose

“…The past few years have seen a tremendous amount of attention devoted to making secure computation truly practical (e.g., [HEKM11,KsS12,KSS13]). With only a few exceptions [DPSZ12, DKL + 13, KSS13], however, this work has tended to focus on secure two-party computation (2PC).…”

“…With only a few exceptions [DPSZ12, DKL + 13, KSS13], however, this work has tended to focus on secure two-party computation (2PC). In the semihonest setting, a series of papers [BDNP08, HKS + 10, HEKM11,HEK12] showed that Yao's garbled circuit technique [Yao86] can yield very efficient protocols for the computation of Boolean circuits. In the malicious setting, Lindell and Pinkas [LP07] initiated use of the cut-and-choose technique, also based on Yao's garbled circuits, for constructing efficient, constant-round protocols.…”