General-Purpose Frameworks for Secure Multi-party Computation

Bio

Marcella Hastings is a fourth year Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in problems related to cryptography and privacy. Marcella’s current research focuses on the practical aspects and applications of secure multi-party computation.This summer, she is visiting the SAIL group at Boston University, where she is working on JIFF, a framework for secure multi-party computation. She received her B.S. from Tufts University in 2015.

Abstract

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows a group of mutually distrustful parties to compute a joint function on their inputs without revealing any information beyond the result of the computation. This type of computation is extremely powerful and has wide-ranging applications in academia, industry, and government. Protocols for secure computation have existed for decades, but only recently have general-purpose frameworks for executing MPC on arbitrary functions been developed. These projects rapidly improved the state of the art, and began to make MPC accessible to non-expert users. However, the field is changing so rapidly that it is difficult even for experts to keep track of the varied capabilities of modern frameworks.

Our work surveys general-purpose frameworks for secure multi-party computation. These tools provide high-level abstractions to describe arbitrary functions and execute secure computation protocols. We consider eleven systems, which we evaluate on a range of criteria, including language expressibility, capabilities of the cryptographic back-end, and accessibility to developers.

In this talk, I will discuss the current state of the field based on our experiences installing, running, and developing sample applications for these systems and our recommendations for future directions in framework development. I will also discuss our open-source repository, which provides a complete virtual environment (Docker container) with all the necessary dependencies to run each framework and our example programs.