Paper 2015/064
Optimally Efficient Multi-Party Fair Exchange and Fair Secure Multi-Party Computation
Handan Kılınç and Alptekin Küpçü
Abstract
Multi-party fair exchange (MFE) and fair secure multi-party computation (fair SMPC) are under-studied fields of research, with prac- tical importance. We examine MFE scenarios where every participant has some item, and at the end of the protocol, either every participant re- ceives every other participant’s item, or no participant receives anything. This is a particularly hard scenario, even though it is directly applica- ble to protocols such as fair SMPC or multi-party contract signing. We further generalize our protocol to work for any exchange topology. We analyze the case where a trusted third party (TTP) is optimistically available, although we emphasize that the trust put on the TTP is only regarding the fairness, and our protocols preserve the privacy of the exchanged items even against a malicious TTP. We construct an asymptotically optimal (for the complete topology) multi-party fair exchange protocol that requires a constant number of rounds, in comparison to linear, and O(n^2) messages, in comparison to cubic, where n is the number of participating parties. We enable the parties to efficiently exchange any item that can be efficiently put into a verifiable escrow (e.g., signatures on a contract). We show how to apply this protocol on top of any SMPC protocol to achieve a fairness guar- antee with very little overhead, especially if the SMPC protocol works with arithmetic circuits. Our protocol guarantees fairness in its strongest sense: even if all n − 1 other participants are malicious and colluding, fairness will hold.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
- Publication info
- Published elsewhere. Minor revision. Full version of CT-RSA 2015 paper with proofs
- Keywords
- multi-party fair exchangefair computationoptimistic modelsecure multi-party computationelectronic payments
- Contact author(s)
- hkilinc @ ku edu tr
- History
- 2019-03-07: last of 5 revisions
- 2015-01-29: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2015/064
- License
-
CC BY