Paper 2015/371

Constant-Round MPC with Fairness and Guarantee of Output Delivery

S. Dov Gordon, Feng-Hao Liu, and Elaine Shi

Abstract

We study the round complexity of multiparty computation with fairness and guaranteed output delivery, assuming existence of an honest majority. We demonstrate a new lower bound and a matching upper bound. Our lower bound rules out any two-round fair protocols in the standalone model, even when the parties are given access to a common reference string (CRS). The lower bound follows by a reduction to the impossibility result of virtual black box obfuscation of arbitrary circuits. Then we demonstrate a three-round protocol with guarantee of output delivery, which in general is harder than achieving fairness (since the latter allows the adversary to force a fair abort). We develop a new construction of a threshold fully homomorphic encryption scheme, with a new property that we call ``flexible'' ciphertexts. Roughly, our threshold encryption scheme allows parties to adapt flexible ciphertexts to the public keys of the non-aborting parties, which provides a way of handling aborts without adding any communication.