Paper 2018/942

Insured MPC: Efficient Secure Computation with Financial Penalties

Carsten Baum, Bernardo David, and Rafael Dowsley

Abstract

Fairness in Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) is known to be impossible to achieve in the presence of a dishonest majority. Previous works have proposed combining MPC protocols with Cryptocurrencies in order to financially punish aborting adversaries, providing an incentive for parties to honestly follow the protocol. This approach also yields privacy-preserving Smart Contracts, where private inputs can be processed with MPC in order to determine the distribution of funds given to the contract. The focus of existing work is on proving that this approach is possible and unfortunately they present monolithic and mostly inefficient constructions. In this work, we put forth the first modular construction of ``Insured MPC'', where either the output of the private computation (which describes how to distribute funds) is fairly delivered or a proof that a set of parties has misbehaved is produced, allowing for financial punishments. Moreover, both the output and the proof of cheating are publicly verifiable, allowing third parties to independently validate an execution. We present a highly efficient compiler that uses any MPC protocol with certain properties together with a standard (non-private) Smart Contract and a publicly verifiable homomorphic commitment scheme to implement Insured MPC. As an intermediate step, we propose the first construction of a publicly verifiable homomorphic commitment scheme achieving composability guarantees and concrete efficiency. Our results are proven in the Global Universal Composability framework using a Global Random Oracle as the setup assumption. From a theoretical perspective, our general results provide the first characterization of sufficient properties that MPC protocols must achieve in order to be efficiently combined with Cryptocurrencies, as well as insights into publicly verifiable protocols. On the other hand, our constructions have highly efficient concrete instantiations, allowing for fast implementations.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Major revision. Financial Cryptography 2020
Keywords
Multiparty ComputationFinancial PenaltiesFairnessComposabilityBlockchain
Contact author(s)
cbaum @ cs au dk
bernardo @ bmdavid com
rafael @ dowsley net
History
2020-03-05: last of 5 revisions
2018-10-05: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2018/942
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2018/942,
      author = {Carsten Baum and Bernardo David and Rafael Dowsley},
      title = {Insured MPC: Efficient Secure Computation with Financial Penalties},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2018/942},
      year = {2018},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/942}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/942}
}
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, eprint.iacr.org does not use cookies or embedded third party content.