Paper 2025/716

Shark: Actively Secure Inference using Function Secret Sharing

Abstract

We consider the problem of actively secure two-party machine-learning inference in the preprocessing model, where the parties obtain (input-independent) correlated randomness in an offline phase that they can then use to run an efficient protocol in the (input-dependent) online phase. In this setting, the state-of-the-art is the work of Escudero et al. (Crypto 2020); unfortunately, that protocol requires a large amount of correlated randomness, extensive communication, and many rounds of interaction, which leads to poor performance. In this work, we show protocols for this setting based on function secret sharing (FSS) that beat the state-of-the-art in all parameters: they use less correlated randomness and fewer rounds, and require lower communication and computation. We achieve this in part by allowing for a mix of boolean and arithmetic values in FSS-based protocols (something not done in prior work), as well as by relying on “interactive FSS,” a generalization of FSS we introduce. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach we build SHARK—the first FSS- based system for actively secure inference—which outperforms the state-of-the-art by up to 2300×.