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Paper 2011/396

Fair Computation with Rational Players

Adam Groce and Jonathan Katz

Abstract

We consider the problem of fair two-party computation, where fairness (informally) means that both parties should learn the correct output. A seminal result of Cleve (STOC 1986) shows that fairness is, in general, impossible to achieve for malicious parties. Here, we treat the parties as rational and seek to understand what can be done. Asharov et al. (Eurocrypt 2011) recently considered this problem and showed impossibility of rational fair computation for a particular function and a particular set of utilities. We observe, however, that in their setting the parties have no incentive to compute the function even in an ideal world where fairness is guaranteed. Revisiting the problem, we show that rational fair computation is possible (for arbitrary functions and utilities) as long as the parties have a strict incentive to compute the function in the ideal world. This gives a new example where game theory can be used to circumvent impossibility results in cryptography.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Unknown where it was published
Keywords
game theorysecure computation
Contact author(s)
jkatz @ cs umd edu
History
2015-04-14: revised
2011-07-28: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2011/396
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY
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