Paper 2021/1049

Binary Search in Secure Computation

Marina Blanton and Chen Yuan

Abstract

Binary search is one of the most popular algorithms in computer science. Realizing it in the context of secure multiparty computation which demands data-oblivious execution, however, is extremely non-trivial. It has been previously implemented only using oblivious RAM (ORAM) for secure computation and in this work we initiate the study of this topic using conventional secure computation techniques based on secret sharing. We develop a suite of protocols with different properties and of different structure for searching a private dataset of $m$ elements by a private numeric key. Our protocols result in $O(m)$ and $O(\sqrt{m})$ communication using only standard and readily available operations based on secret sharing. We further extend our protocols to support write operations, namely, binary search that obliviously updates the selected element, and realize two variants: updating non-key fields and updating the key field. Our implementation results indicate that even after applying known and our own optimizations to the fastest ORAM constructions, our solutions are faster than optimized ORAM schemes for datasets of up to $$ elements and by up to two orders of magnitude. We hope that this work will prompt further interest in seeking efficient realizations of this important problem.