Paper 2021/342

MPCAuth: Multi-factor Authentication for Distributed-trust Systems

Abstract

Systems with distributed trust have attracted growing research attention and seen increasing industry adoptions. In these systems, critical secrets are distributed across N servers, and computations are performed privately using secure multi-party computation (SMPC). Authentication for these distributed-trust systems faces two challenges. The first challenge is ease-of-use. Namely, how can an authentication protocol maintain its user experience without sacrificing security? To avoid a central point of attack, a client needs to authenticate to each server separately. However, this would require the client to authenticate N times for each authentication factor, which greatly hampers usability. The second challenge is privacy, as the client’s sensitive profiles are now exposed to all N servers under different trust domains, which creates N times the attack surface for the profile data. We present MPCAuth, a multi-factor authentication system for distributed-trust applications that address both challenges. Our system enables a client to authenticate to N servers independently with the work of only one authentication. In addition, our system is profile hiding, meaning that the client’s authentication profiles such as her email username, phone number, passwords, and biometric features are not revealed unless all servers are compromised. We propose secure and practical protocols for an array of widely adopted authentication factors, including email passcodes, SMS messages, U2F, security questions/passwords, and biometrics. Our system finds practical applications in the space of cryptocurrency custody and collaborative machine learning, and benefits future adoptions of distributed-trust applications.