International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The notion of aggregate signatures allows for combining signatures from different parties into a short certificate that attests that *all* parties signed a message. In this work, we lift this notion to capture different, more expressive signing policies. For example, we can certify that a message was signed by a (weighted) threshold of signers. We present the first constructions of aggregate signatures for monotone policies based on standard polynomial-time cryptographic assumptions. The aggregate signatures in our schemes are succinct, i.e., their size is *independent* of the number of signers. Moreover, verification is also succinct if all parties sign the same message (or if the messages have a succinct representation). All prior work requires either interaction between the parties or non-standard assumptions (that imply SNARKs for NP). Our signature schemes are based on non-interactive batch arguments (BARGs) for monotone policies [Brakerski-Brodsky-Kalai-Lombardi-Paneth, Crypto'23]. In contrast to previous constructions, our BARGs satisfy a new notion of *adaptive* security which is instrumental to our application. Our new BARGs for monotone policies can be constructed from standard BARGs and other standard assumptions.

A long line of work has investigated the design of scalable secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols with computational and communication complexity independent of the number of parties (beyond any dependence on the circuit size). We present the first unconditionally-secure MPC protocols for arithmetic circuits over *large fields* with total computation $\bigO{|C|\log|F|}$, where $|C|$ and $F|$ denote the circuit and field size, respectively. Prior work could either achieve similar complexity only in *communication*, or required highly structured circuits, or expensive circuit transformations. To obtain our results, we depart from the prior approach of share packing in linear secret-sharing schemes; instead, we use an ``unpacking'' approach via *non-linear* secret sharing.

A homomorphic secret sharing (HSS) scheme allows a client to delegate a computation to a group of untrusted servers while achieving input privacy as long as at least one server is honest. In recent years, many HSS schemes have been constructed that have, in turn, found numerous applications to cryptography. Prior work on HSS focuses on the setting where the servers are semi-honest. In this work we lift HSS to the setting of malicious evaluators. We propose the notion of *HSS with verifiable evaluation* (ve-HSS) that guarantees correctness of output *even when all the servers are corrupted*. ve-HSS retains all the attractive features of HSS and adds the new feature of succinct (public) verification of output. We present *black-box* constructions of ve-HSS by devising generic transformations for semi-honest HSS schemes (with negligible error). This provides a new non-interactive method for verifiable and private outsourcing of computation.

We provide the first constructions of SNARGs for Batch-NP and P based solely on the sub-exponential Decisional Diffie Hellman (DDH) assumption. Our schemes achieve poly-logarithmic proof sizes. We obtain our results by following the correlation-intractability framework for secure instantiation of the Fiat-Shamir paradigm. The centerpiece of our results and of independent interest is a new construction of correlation-intractable hash functions for ``small input'' product relations verifiable in TC0, based on sub-exponential DDH.

A private set membership (PSM) protocol allows a ``receiver'' to learn whether its input $x$ is contained in a large database $\algo{DB}$ held by a ``sender''. In this work, we define and construct \emph{credible private set membership (C-PSM)} protocols: in addition to the conventional notions of privacy, C-PSM provides a soundness guarantee that it is hard for a sender (that does not know $x$) to convince the receiver that $x \in \algo{DB}$. Furthermore, the communication complexity must be logarithmic in the size of $\algo{DB}$. We provide 2-round (i.e., round-optimal) C-PSM constructions based on standard assumptions: \begin{itemize}[itemsep=0pt] \item We present a black-box construction in the plain model based on DDH or LWE. \item Next, we consider protocols that support predicates $f$ beyond string equality, i.e., the receiver can learn if there exists $w \in \algo{DB}$ such that $f(x,w) = 1$. We present two results with transparent setups: (1) A black-box protocol, based on DDH or LWE, for the class of NC$^1$ functions $f$ which are efficiently searchable. (2) An LWE-based construction for all bounded-depth circuits. The only non-black-box use of cryptography in this construction is through the bootstrapping procedure in fully homomorphic encryption. \end{itemize} As an application, our protocols can be used to build enhanced leaked password notification services, where unlike existing solutions, a dubious sender {\em cannot} fool a receiver into changing its password.

As end-to-end encrypted messaging services become widely adopted, law enforcement agencies have increasingly expressed concern that such services interfere with their ability to maintain public safety. Indeed, there is a direct tension between preserving user privacy and enabling content moderation on these platforms. Recent research has begun to address this tension, proposing systems that purport to strike a balance between the privacy of ``honest’’ users and traceability of ``malicious’’ users. Unfortunately, these systems suffer from a lack of protection against malicious or coerced service providers. In this work, we address the privacy vs. content moderation question through the lens of pre-constrained cryptography [Ananth et al., ITCS 2022]. We introduce the notion of {\em set pre-constrained} (SPC) {\em group signatures} that guarantees security against \emph{malicious key generators}. SPC group signatures offer the ability to trace users in messaging systems who originate pre-defined illegal content (such as child sexual abuse material), while providing security against malicious service providers. We construct concretely efficient protocols for SPC group signatures, and demonstrate the real-world feasibility of our approach via an implementation. The starting point for our solution is the recently introduced Apple PSI system, which we significantly modify to improve security and expand functionality.

The security of many powerful cryptographic systems such as secure multiparty computation, threshold encryption, and threshold signatures rests on trust assumptions about the parties. The de-facto model treats all parties equally and requires that a certain fraction of the parties are honest. While this paradigm of one-person-one-vote has been very successful over the years, current and emerging practical use cases suggest that it is outdated. In this work, we consider {\em weighted} cryptosystems where every party is assigned a certain weight and the trust assumption is that a certain fraction of the total weight is honest. This setting can be translated to the standard setting (where each party has a unit weight) via virtualization. However, this method is quite expensive, incurring a multiplicative overhead in the weight. We present new weighted cryptosystems with significantly better efficiency: our proposed schemes incur only an {\em additive} overhead in weights. \begin{itemize} \item We first present a weighted ramp secret-sharing scheme (WRSS) where the size of a secret share is $O(w)$ (where $w$ corresponds to the weight). In comparison, Shamir's secret sharing with virtualization requires secret shares of size $w\cdot\lambda$, where $\lambda=\log |\bbF|$ is the security parameter. \item Next, we use our WRSS to construct weighted versions of (semi-honest) secure multiparty computation (MPC), threshold encryption, and threshold signatures. All these schemes inherit the efficiency of our WRSS and incur only an additive overhead in weights. \end{itemize} Our WRSS is based on the Chinese remainder theorem-based secret-sharing scheme. Interestingly, this secret-sharing scheme is {\em non-linear} and only achieves statistical privacy. These distinct features introduce several technical hurdles in applications to MPC and threshold cryptosystems. We resolve these challenges by developing several new ideas.

We build non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) and ZAP arguments for all NP where soundness holds for infinitely-many security parameters, and against uniform adversaries, assuming the subexponential hardness of the Computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption. We additionally prove the existence of NIZK arguments with these same properties assuming the polynomial hardness of both CDH and the Learning Parity with Noise (LPN) assumption. In both cases, the CDH assumption does not require a group equipped with a pairing. Infinitely-often uniform security is a standard byproduct of commonly used non-black-box techniques that build on disjunction arguments on the (in)security of some primitive. In the course of proving our results, we develop a new variant of this non-black-box technique that yields improved guarantees: we obtain explicit constructions (previous works generally only obtained existential results) where security holds for a relatively dense set of security parameters (as opposed to an arbitrary infinite set of security parameters). We demonstrate that our techniques can have applications beyond our main results.

We revisit the well-studied problem of preventing steganographic communication in multi-party communications. While this is known to be a provably impossible task, we propose a new model that allows circumventing this impossibility. In our model, the parties first publish a single message during an honest \emph{non-interactive} pre-processing phase and then later interact in an execution phase. We show that in this model, it is indeed possible to prevent any steganographic communication in zero-knowledge protocols. Our solutions rely on standard cryptographic assumptions.

We study secure multi-party computation (MPC) protocols for branching circuits that contain multiple sub-circuits (i.e., branches) and the output of the circuit is that of single ``active'' branch. Crucially, the identity of the active branch must remain hidden from the protocol participants. While such circuits can be securely computed by evaluating each branch and then multiplexing the output, such an approach incurs a communication cost linear in the size of the entire circuit. To alleviate this, a series of recent works have investigated the problem of reducing the communication cost of branching executions inside MPC (without relying on fully homomorphic encryption). Most notably, the stacked garbling paradigm [Heath and Kolesnikov, CRYPTO'20] yields garbled circuits for branching circuits whose size only depends on the size of the largest branch. Presently, however, it is not known how to obtain similar communication improvements for secure computation involving {\em more than two parties}. In this work, we provide a generic framework for branching multi-party computation that supports {\em any number of parties}. The communication complexity of our scheme is proportional to the size of the largest branch and the computation is linear in the size of the entire circuit. We provide an implementation and benchmarks to demonstrate practicality of our approach.

One-time programs, originally formulated by Goldwasser et al.~\cite{goldwasser2008one}, are a powerful cryptographic primitive with compelling applications. Known solutions for one-time programs, however, require specialized secure hardware that is not widely available (or, alternatively, access to blockchains and very strong cryptographic tools). In this work we investigate the possibility of realizing one-time programs from a recent and now more commonly available hardware functionality: the {\em counter lockbox}. A counter lockbox is a stateful functionality that protects an encryption key under a user-specified password, and enforces a limited number of incorrect guesses. Counter lockboxes have become widely available in consumer devices and cloud platforms. We show that counter lockboxes can be used to realize one-time programs for general functionalities. We develop a number of techniques to reduce the number of counter lockboxes required for our constructions, that may be of independent interest.

We provide the first constructions of non-interactive zero-knowledge and Zap arguments for NP based on the sub-exponential hardness of Decisional Diffie-Hellman against polynomial time adversaries (without use of groups with pairings). Central to our results, and of independent interest, is a new notion of interactive trapdoor hashing protocols.

Running secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols with hundreds or thousands of players would allow leveraging large volunteer networks (such as blockchains and Tor) and help justify honest majority assumptions. However, most existing protocols have at least a linear (multiplicative) dependence on the number of players, making scaling difficult. Known protocols with asymptotic efficiency independent of the number of parties (excluding additive factors) require expensive circuit transformations that induce large overheads. We observe that the circuits used in many important applications of MPC such as training algorithms used to create machine learning models have a highly repetitive structure. We formalize this class of circuits and propose an MPC protocol that achieves O(|C|) total complexity for this class. We implement our protocol and show that it is practical and outperforms O(n|C|) protocols for modest numbers of players.

We consider the problem of round-optimal *unbounded MPC*: in the first round, parties publish a message that depends only on their input. In the second round, any subset of parties can jointly and securely compute any function $f$ over their inputs in a single round of broadcast. We do not impose any a priori bound on the number of parties nor on the size of the functions that can be computed. Our main result is a semi-honest two-round protocol for unbounded MPC in the plain model from the hardness of the standard learning with errors (LWE) problem. Prior work in the same setting assumes the hardness of problems over bilinear maps. Thus, our protocol is the first example of unbounded MPC that is post-quantum secure. The central ingredient of our protocol is a new scheme of attribute-based secure function evaluation (AB-SFE) with *public decryption*. Our construction combines techniques from the realm of homomorphic commitments with delegation of lattice basis. We believe that such a scheme may find further applications in the future.

Existing approaches to secure multiparty computation (MPC) require all participants to commit to the entire duration of the protocol. As interest in MPC continues to grow, it is inevitable that there will be a desire to use it to evaluate increasingly complex functionalities, resulting in computations spanning several hours or days. Such scenarios call for a *dynamic* participation model for MPC where participants have the flexibility to go offline as needed and (re)join when they have available computational resources. Such a model would also democratize access to privacy-preserving computation by facilitating an ``MPC-as-a-service'' paradigm --- the deployment of MPC in volunteer-operated networks (such as blockchains, where dynamism is inherent) that perform computation on behalf of clients. In this work, we initiate the study of *fluid MPC*, where parties can dynamically join and leave the computation. The minimum commitment required from each participant is referred to as *fluidity*, measured in the number of rounds of communication that it must stay online. Our contributions are threefold: - We provide a formal treatment of fluid MPC, exploring various possible modeling choices. - We construct information-theoretic fluid MPC protocols in the honest-majority setting. Our protocols achieve *maximal fluidity*, meaning that a party can exit the computation after receiving and sending messages in one round. - We implement our protocol and test it in multiple network settings.

We study the problem of designing *non-interactive batch arguments* for NP. Such an argument system allows an efficient prover to prove multiple $\npol$ statements, with size much smaller than the combined witness length. We provide the first construction of such an argument system for NP in the common reference string model based on standard cryptographic assumptions. Prior works either require non-falsifiable assumptions (or the random oracle model) or can only support private verification. At the heart of our result is a new *dual mode* interactive batch argument system for NP. We show how to apply the correlation-intractability framework for Fiat-Shamir -- that has primarily been applied to proof systems -- to such interactive arguments.

Oblivious transfer (OT) is a foundational primitive within cryptography owing to its connection with secure computation. One of the oldest constructions of oblivious transfer was from certified trapdoor permutations (TDPs). However several decades later, we do not know if a similar construction can be obtained from TDPs in general. In this work, we study the problem of constructing round optimal oblivious transfer from trapdoor permutations. In particular, we obtain the following new results (in the plain model) relying on TDPs in a black-box manner: – Three-round oblivious transfer protocol that guarantees indistinguishability-security against malicious senders (and semi-honest receivers). – Four-round oblivious transfer protocol secure against malicious adversaries with black-box simulation-based security. By combining our second result with an already known compiler we obtain the first round-optimal 2-party computation protocol that relies in a black-box way on TDPs. A key technical tool underlying our results is a new primitive we call dual witness encryption (DWE) that may be of independent interest.

Recently, a sequence of works have made strong advances in two-round (i.e., round-optimal) secure multi-party computation (MPC). In the {\em honest-majority} setting -- the focus of this work -- Ananth et al. [CRYPTO'18, EC'19], Applebaum et al. [TCC'18, EC'19] and Garg et al. [TCC'18] have established the feasibility of general two-round MPC in standard communication models involving broadcast ($\BC$) and private point-to-point ($\PTP$) channels. In this work, we set out to understand what features of the communication model are necessary for these results, and more broadly the design of two-round MPC. Focusing our study on the plain model -- the most natural model for honest-majority MPC -- we obtain the following results: 1. {\bf Dishonest majority from Honest majority:} In the two round setting, honest-majority MPC and dishonest-majority MPC are surprisingly close, and often {\em equivalent}. This follows from our results that the former implies 2-message oblivious transfer, in many settings. (i) We show that without private point-to-point ($\PTP$) channels, i.e., when we use only broadcast ($\BC$) channels, {\em honest-majority MPC implies 2-message oblivious transfer}. (ii) Furthermore, this implication holds even when we use both $\PTP$ and $\BC$, provided that the MPC protocol is robust against ``fail-stop'' adversaries. 2. {\bf Best-Achievable Security:} While security with guaranteed output delivery (and even fairness) against malicious adversaries is impossible in two rounds, nothing is known with regards to the ``next best'' security notion, namely, security with identifiable abort (\IA). We show that \IA\ is also {\em impossible} to achieve with honest-majority even if we use both $\PTP$ and $\BC$ channels. However, if we replace $\PTP$ channels with a ``bare'' (i.e., untrusted) public-key infrastructure ($\PKI$), then even security with guaranteed output delivery (and hence $\IA$) is possible to achieve. \end{itemize} These results ``explain'' that the reliance on $\PTP$ channels (together with $\BC$) in the recent two-round protocols in the plain model was in fact {\em necessary}, and that these protocols {\em couldn't} have achieved a stronger security guarantee, namely, $\IA$. Overall, our results (put together with prior works) fully determine the best-achievable security for honest-majority MPC in different communication models in two rounds. As a consequence, they yield the following hierarchy of communication models: $\BC < \PTP < \BC+\PTP < \BC+\PKI$. This shows that $\BC$ channel is the {\em weakest} communication model, and that $\BC+\PKI$ model is strictly stronger than $\BC+\PTP$ model.

We construct a four round secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocol in the plain model that achieves security against any dishonest majority. The security of our protocol relies only on the existence of four round oblivious transfer. This culminates the long line of research on constructing round-efficient MPC from minimal assumptions (at least w.r.t. black-box simulation).

We study the problem of achieving statistical privacy in interactive proof systems and oblivious transfer -- two of the most well studied two-party protocols -- when limited rounds of interaction are available. -- Statistical Zaps: We give the first construction of statistical Zaps, namely, two-round statistical witness-indistinguishable (WI) protocols with a public-coin verifier. Our construction achieves computational soundness based on the quasi-polynomial hardness of learning with errors assumption. -- Three-Round Statistical Receiver-Private Oblivious Transfer: We give the first construction of a three-round oblivious transfer (OT) protocol -- in the plain model -- that achieves statistical privacy for receivers and computational privacy for senders against malicious adversaries, based on polynomial-time assumptions. The round-complexity of our protocol is optimal. We obtain our first result by devising a public-coin approach to compress sigma protocols, without relying on trusted setup. To obtain our second result, we devise a general framework via a new notion of statistical hash commitments that may be of independent interest.

The notion of multi-key fully homomorphic encryption (multi-key FHE) [Lopez-Alt, Tromer, Vaikuntanathan, STOC'12] was proposed as a generalization of fully homomorphic encryption to the multiparty setting. In a multi-key FHE scheme for $n$ parties, each party can individually choose a key pair and use it to encrypt its own private input. Given n ciphertexts computed in this manner, the parties can homomorphically evaluate a circuit C over them to obtain a new ciphertext containing the output of C, which can then be decrypted via a decryption protocol. The key efficiency property is that the size of the (evaluated) ciphertext is independent of the size of the circuit. Multi-key FHE with one-round decryption [Mukherjee and Wichs, Eurocrypt'16], has found several powerful applications in cryptography over the past few years. However, an important drawback of all such known schemes is that they require a trusted setup. In this work, we address the problem of constructing multi-key FHE in the plain model. We obtain the following results: - A multi-key FHE scheme with one-round decryption based on the hardness of learning with errors (LWE), ring LWE, and decisional small polynomial ratio (DSPR) problems. - A variant of multi-key FHE where we relax the decryption algorithm to be non-compact -- i.e., where the decryption complexity can depend on the size of C -- based on the hardness of LWE. We call this variant multi-homomorphic encryption (MHE). We observe that MHE is already sufficient for some of the applications of multi-key FHE.

Reducing the rounds of interaction in secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols has been the topic of study of many works. One popular approach to reduce rounds is to construct {\em round compression compilers}. A round compression compiler is one that takes a highly interactive protocol and transforms it into a protocol with far fewer rounds. The design of round compression compilers has traditionally focused on preserving the security properties of the underlying protocol and in particular, not much attention has been given towards preserving their computational and communication efficiency. Indeed, the recent round compression compilers that yield round-optimal MPC protocols incur large computational and communication overhead. In this work, we initiate the study of {\em efficiency-preserving} round compression compilers, i.e. compilers that translate the efficiency benefits of the underlying highly interactive protocols to the fewer round setting. Focusing on the honest majority setting (with near-optimal corruption threshold $\frac{1}{2} - \varepsilon$, for any $\varepsilon > 0$), we devise a new compiler that yields two round (i.e., round optimal) semi-honest MPC with similar communication efficiency as the underlying (arbitrary round) protocol. By applying our compiler on the most efficient known MPC protocols, we obtain a two-round semi-honest protocol based on one-way functions, with total communication (and per-party computation) cost $\widetilde{O}(s+n^4)$ -- a significant improvement over prior two-round protocols with cost $\widetilde{O}(n^\tau s+n^{\tau+1}d)$, where $\tau\geq 2$, $s$ is the size of the circuit computing the function and $d$ the corresponding depth. Our result can also be extended to handle malicious adversaries, either using stronger assumptions in the public key infrastructure (PKI) model, or in the plain model using an extra round. An artifact of our approach is that the resultant protocol is ``unbalanced'' in the amount of computation performed by different parties. We give evidence that this is {\em necessary} in our setting. Our impossibility result makes novel use of the ``MPC-in-the-head" paradigm which has typically been used to demonstrate feasibility results.

We provide the first constructions of two round information-theoretic (IT) secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols in the plain model that tolerate any $$t<n/2$$t<n/2 malicious corruptions. Our protocols satisfy the strongest achievable standard notions of security in two rounds in different communication models.Previously, IT-MPC protocols in the plain model either required a larger number of rounds, or a smaller minority of corruptions.

We study the foundations of secure computation in the blockchain-hybrid model, where a blockchain – modeled as a global functionality – is available as an Oracle to all the participants of a cryptographic protocol. We demonstrate both destructive and constructive applications of blockchains:We show that classical rewinding-based simulation techniques used in many security proofs fail against blockchain-active adversaries that have read and post access to a global blockchain. In particular, we show that zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs with black-box simulation are impossible against blockchain-active adversaries.Nevertheless, we show that achieving security against blockchain-active adversaries is possible if the honest parties are also blockchain active. We construct an $$\omega (1)$$-round ZK protocol with black-box simulation. We show that this result is tight by proving the impossibility of constant-round ZK with black-box simulation.Finally, we demonstrate a novel application of blockchains to overcome the known impossibility results for concurrent secure computation in the plain model. We construct a concurrent self-composable secure computation protocol for general functionalities in the blockchain-hybrid model based on standard cryptographic assumptions. We develop a suite of techniques for constructing secure protocols in the blockchain-hybrid model that we hope will find applications to future research in this area.

Non-malleable codes (NMC) introduced by Dziembowski et al. [ICS’10] allow one to encode “passive” data in such a manner that when a codeword is tampered, the original data either remains completely intact or is essentially destroyed.In this work, we initiate the study of interactive non-malleable codes (INMCs) that allow for encoding “active communication” rather than passive data. An INMC allows two parties to engage in an interactive protocol such that an adversary who is able to tamper with the protocol messages either leaves the original transcript intact (i.e., the parties are able to reconstruct the original transcript) or the transcript is completely destroyed and replaced with an unrelated one.We formalize a tampering model for interactive protocols and put forward the notion of INMCs. Since constructing INMCs for general adversaries is impossible (as in the case of non-malleable codes), we construct INMCs for several specific classes of tampering functions. These include bounded state, split state, and fragmented sliding window tampering functions. We also obtain lower bounds for threshold tampering functions via a connection to interactive coding. All of our results are unconditional.

We study the broadcast message complexity of secure multiparty computation (MPC), namely, the total number of messages that are required for securely computing any functionality in the broadcast model of communication.MPC protocols are traditionally designed in the simultaneous broadcast model, where each round consists of every party broadcasting a message to the other parties. We show that this method of communication is sub-optimal; specifically, by eliminating simultaneity, it is, in fact, possible to reduce the broadcast message complexity of MPC.More specifically, we establish tight lower and upper bounds on the broadcast message complexity of n-party MPC for every $$t<n$$ corruption threshold, both in the plain model as well as common setup models. For example, our results show that the optimal broadcast message complexity of semi-honest MPC can be much lower than 2n, but necessarily requires at least three rounds of communication. We also extend our results to the malicious setting in setup models.

We revisit the problem of universally composable (UC) secure multiparty computation in the stateless hardware token model. We construct a three round multi-party computation protocol for general functions based on one-way functions where each party sends two tokens to every other party. Relaxing to the two-party case, we also construct a two round protocol based on one-way functions where each party sends a single token to the other party, and at the end of the protocol, both parties learn the output.One of the key components in the above constructions is a new two-round oblivious transfer protocol based on one-way functions using only one token, which can be reused an unbounded polynomial number of times. All prior constructions required either stronger complexity assumptions, or larger number of rounds, or a larger number of tokens.

We construct public-key function-private predicate encryption for the “small superset functionality,” recently introduced by Beullens and Wee (PKC 2019). This functionality captures several important classes of predicates:Point functions. For point function predicates, our construction is equivalent to public-key function-private anonymous identity-based encryption.Conjunctions. If the predicate computes a conjunction, our construction is a public-key function-private hidden vector encryption scheme. This addresses an open problem posed by Boneh, Raghunathan, and Segev (ASIACRYPT 2013).d-CNFs and read-once conjunctions of d-disjunctions for constant-size d. Our construction extends the group-based obfuscation schemes of Bishop et al. (CRYPTO 2018), Beullens and Wee (PKC 2019), and Bartusek et al. (EUROCRYPT 2019) to the setting of public-key function-private predicate encryption. We achieve an average-case notion of function privacy, which guarantees that a decryption key $$\mathsf {sk} _f$$ reveals nothing about f as long as f is drawn from a distribution with sufficient entropy. We formalize this security notion as a generalization of the (enhanced) real-or-random function privacy definition of Boneh, Raghunathan, and Segev (CRYPTO 2013). Our construction relies on bilinear groups, and we prove security in the generic bilinear group model.

We study the exact round complexity of secure multiparty computation (MPC) in the honest majority setting. We construct several round-optimaln-party protocols, tolerating any $$t<\frac{n}{2}$$ corruptions. 1.Security with abort: We give the first construction of two round MPC for general functions that achieves security with abort against malicious adversaries in the plain model. The security of our protocol only relies on one-way functions.2.Guaranteed output delivery: We also construct protocols that achieve security with guaranteed output delivery: (i) Against fail-stop adversaries, we construct two round MPC either in the (bare) public-key infrastructure model with no additional assumptions, or in the plain model assuming two-round semi-honest oblivious transfer. In three rounds, however, we can achieve security assuming only one-way functions. (ii) Against malicious adversaries, we construct three round MPC in the plain model, assuming public-key encryption and Zaps.Previously, such protocols were only known based on specific learning assumptions and required the use of common reference strings. All of our results are obtained via general compilers that may be of independent interest.

We devise a new partitioned simulation technique for MPC where the simulator uses different strategies for simulating the view of aborting adversaries and non-aborting adversaries. The protagonist of this technique is a new notion of promise zero knowledge (ZK) where the ZK property only holds against non-aborting verifiers. We show how to realize promise ZK in three rounds in the simultaneous-message model assuming polynomially hard DDH (or QR or N$$^{th}$$-Residuosity).We demonstrate the following applications of our new technique:We construct the first round-optimal (i.e., four round) MPC protocol for general functions based on polynomially hard DDH (or QR or N$$^{th}$$-Residuosity).We further show how to overcome the four-round barrier for MPC by constructing a three-round protocol for “list coin-tossing” – a slight relaxation of coin-tossing that suffices for most conceivable applications – based on polynomially hard DDH (or QR or N$$^{th}$$-Residuosity). This result generalizes to randomized input-less functionalities. Previously, four round MPC protocols required sub-exponential-time hardness assumptions and no multi-party three-round protocols were known for any relaxed security notions with polynomial-time simulation against malicious adversaries.In order to base security on polynomial-time standard assumptions, we also rely upon a leveled rewinding security technique that can be viewed as a polynomial-time alternative to leveled complexity leveraging for achieving “non-malleability” across different primitives.

The notion of non-interactive secure computation (NISC) first introduced in the work of Ishai et al. [EUROCRYPT 2011] studies the following problem: Suppose a receiver R wishes to publish an encryption of her secret input y so that any sender S with input x can then send a message m that reveals f(x, y) to R (for some function f). Here, m can be viewed as an encryption of f(x, y) that can be decrypted by R. NISC requires security against both malicious senders and receivers, and also requires the receiver’s message to be reusable across multiple computations (w.r.t. a fixed input of the receiver).All previous solutions to this problem necessarily rely upon OT (or specific number-theoretic assumptions) even in the common reference string model or the random oracle model or to achieve weaker notions of security such as super-polynomial-time simulation.In this work, we construct a NISC protocol based on the minimal assumption of one way functions, in the stateless hardware token model. Our construction achieves UC security and requires a single token sent by the receiver to the sender.