### Valiant's Universal Circuit is Practical

Ágnes Kiss and Thomas Schneider

##### Abstract

Universal circuits (UCs) can be programmed to evaluate any circuit of a given size $k$. They provide elegant solutions in various application scenarios, e.g. for private function evaluation (PFE) and for improving the flexibility of attribute-based encryption (ABE) schemes. The optimal size of a universal circuit is proven to be $\Omega(k\log k)$. Valiant (STOC'76) proposed a size-optimized UC construction, which has not been put in practice ever since. The only implementation of universal circuits was provided by Kolesnikov and Schneider (FC'08), with size $\mathcal{O}(k\log^2 k)$. In this paper, we refine the size of Valiant's UC and further improve the construction by (at least) $2k$. We show that due to recent optimizations and our improvements, it is the best solution to apply in the case for circuits with a constant number of inputs and outputs. When the number of inputs or outputs is linear in the number of gates, we propose a more efficient hybrid solution based on the two existing constructions. We validate the practicality of Valiant's UC, by giving an example implementation for PFE using these size-optimized UCs.

Note: Number of copy gates revised in Tables 1 and 3

Available format(s)
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
A minor revision of an IACR publication in EUROCRYPT 2016
Keywords
Universal circuitsize-optimizationprivate function evaluation
Contact author(s)
agnes kiss @ crisp-da de
History
2016-02-19: last of 3 revisions
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2016/093

CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2016/093,
author = {Ágnes Kiss and Thomas Schneider},
title = {Valiant's Universal Circuit is Practical},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2016/093},
year = {2016},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/093}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/093}
}
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