Paper 2014/224

Whitewash: Outsourcing Garbled Circuit Generation for Mobile Devices

Henry Carter, Charles Lever, and Patrick Traynor

Abstract

Garbled circuits offer a powerful primitive for computation on a user’s personal data while keeping that data private. Despite recent improvements, constructing and evaluating circuits of any useful size remains expensive on the limited hardware resources of a smartphone, the primary computational device available to most users around the world. In this work, we develop a new technique for securely outsourcing the generation of garbled circuits to a Cloud provider. By outsourcing the circuit generation, we are able to eliminate the most costly operations from the mobile device, including oblivious transfers. After proving the security of our techniques in the malicious model, we experimentally demonstrate that our new protocol, built on this role reversal, decreases execution time by 98% and reduces network costs by as much as 92% compared to previous outsourcing protocols. In so doing, we demonstrate that the use of garbled circuits on mobile devices can be made nearly as practical as it is becoming for server-class machines.