The notion of secure multiparty computation (MPC) [16, 42] is fundamental in cryptography. Informally speaking, an MPC protocol allows mutually distrusting parties to jointly evaluate a function on their private inputs in such a manner that the protocol execution does not leak anything beyond the output of the function.
A fundamental measure of efficiency in MPC is round complexity, i.e., the number of rounds of communication between the parties. Protocols with smaller round complexity are more desirable so as to minimize the effect of network latency, which in turn decreases the time complexity of the protocol. Indeed, the round complexity of MPC has been extensively studied over the last three decades.
In this work, we study round-optimal MPC against malicious adversaries who may corrupt an arbitrary subset of parties, in the plain model without any trusted setup assumptions. We consider the traditional simultaneous message model for MPC, where in each round of the protocol, each party simultaneously broadcasts a message to the other parties.
A lower bound for this setting was established last year by Garg et al. [14] who proved that three rounds are insufficient for coin-tossing w.r.t. black-box simulation. (Their work builds on [26] who proved the necessity of five rounds for coin-tossing in the unidirectional message model.) In the positive direction, several constant-round MPC protocols were constructed in a long sequence of works, based on a variety of assumptions and techniques (see, e.g., [18, 27, 34, 35, 41]). Garg et al. [14] established an upper bound on the exact round complexity of MPC by constructing a five round protocol based on indistinguishability obfuscation [4, 12] and some additional assumptions.Footnote 1 Their work constitutes the state of the art on this subject.
Our Goals. Presently, no constructions of indistinguishability obfuscation are known from standard assumptions. This motivates the following important question:
Does there exist a five round maliciously-secure MPC protocol for general functions based on standard polynomial-time assumptions?
Furthermore, given the gap between the lower bound (three rounds) and the upper bound (five rounds) established by [14], we ask whether their upper bound is tight:
Does there exist a four round maliciously-secure MPC protocol for general functions?
In this work, we resolve both of these questions in the affirmative.
The Main Barrier. We highlight the main conceptual barrier towards achieving our goals. Garg et al. [14] follow a natural two-step approach to obtain their positive results: in the first step, they construct a four round multiparty coin-tossing protocol. In the next step, they use their coin-tossing protocol to replace the common random string (CRS) in a two-round MPC protocol in the CRS model [11, 31].
We note, however, that this approach, in general, cannot do better than five rounds. Indeed, since at least one of the rounds of the two-round MPC must depend upon the CRS, we can only hope to parallelize its first round with the coin-tossing protocol. Since coin-tossing requires four rounds, this only yields a five round protocol at best.
A New Approach. In this work, we present a new approach towards constructing round-optimal MPC protocols in the plain model. At a high level, our approach implements the classical GMW methodology [16] for constructing maliciously-secure MPC protocols, with a crucial twist, to minimize the number of rounds. This approach is inspired by the beautiful work of Chandran et al. [8] for constructing covert multiparty computation protocols [8, 20, 40].
Recall that the GMW compiler transforms a semi-honest MPC protocol into a maliciously secure one by requiring the parties to prove (using zero-knowledge proofs [17]) that each message in the semi-honest protocol was computed “honestly.” Towards our goal of minimizing round complexity, we cannot afford to prove honest behavior with every round of semi-honest MPC. Therefore, in our approach, the parties prove honest behavior only once.
At first, such an approach may sound completely absurd. If each party is only required to give a single proof of honest behavior, then a malicious adversary may choose to cheat in the first few rounds of the semi-honest MPC protocol. By the time the proof is completed and the honest parties are able to detect cheating, it may already be “too late.” Indeed, the opportunity to cheat in even a single round may be sufficient for a malicious adversary to completely break the security of a semi-honest protocol. Therefore, it is not at all clear why such an approach can be implemented in a secure manner.
In order to tackle this problem, we design a “special-purpose” semi-honest MPC protocol that remains partially immune to malicious behavior before the last round of the protocol. Specifically, in such a protocol, an adversary can influence the protocol outcome but not learn any private information by behaving maliciously before the last round. We then “shield” the last round from being revealed to the adversary until it has proven honest behavior for all of the preceding rounds. A single proof suffices to accomplish this task. By parallelizing this proof with the semi-honest MPC, we are able to minimize the round complexity.
We note that the above idea of delaying the proof of honest behavior to the end of the computation was first developed in [8]. While they developed this technique to achieve covert security (namely, hiding protocol participation from other players), we use it in our setting to minimize round complexity.
1.1 Our Results
We present a new approach for constructing round-efficient MPC protocols that are secure against malicious adversaries in the plain model. Using this approach, we are able to achieve both of our aforementioned goals.
I. Robust Semi-honest MPC. As a first step towards obtaining our results for maliciously-secure MPC, we construct a four round robust semi-honest MPC protocol that remains partially immune to malicious behavior. In this protocol, at the end of the first three rounds of computation, each party receives a secret share of the function output. In the last round, the parties simply exchange their shares to reconstruct the output. The key security property of this protocol is that if the adversary cheats in the first three rounds, then it can only influence the function output, but not learn any private information.
We construct such an MPC scheme for general functions assuming the existence of low-depth pseudorandom generators (PRGs) and a two-round “covert” oblivious transfer (OT) protocol [40].Footnote 2 Both of these primitives can be instantiated from the Decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) assumption.
Theorem 1
Assuming DDH, there exists a four round robust semi-honest MPC protocol for general functions.
The above result may be of independent interest.
II. Maliciously-secure MPC. Using Theorem 1, we next construct maliciously-secure MPC protocols in the plain model.
Our first result is a five round MPC protocol based on any four-round robust semi-honest MPC, injective one-way functions and collision-resistant hash functions (CRHFs). Since injective one-way functions and CRHFs can be built from Discrete Log, we obtain the following result:
Theorem 2
(Five Rounds). Assuming DDH, there exists a five round maliciously-secure MPC protocol for computing general functions.
We next modify our five round protocol to obtain a four round protocol, albeit using sub-exponential hardness. The security of our construction uses complexity leveraging between multiple primitives.
Theorem 3
(Four Rounds). Assuming one-way permutations and sub-exponentially secure DDH, there exists a four round maliciously-secure MPC protocol for computing general functions.
1.2 Our Techniques
As discussed earlier, the approach of Garg et al. [14] for constructing maliciously-secure MPC protocols is unsuitable for achieving our goals. Therefore, we develop a new approach for constructing round-efficient MPC against malicious adversaries.
At a high-level, our approach implements the GMW paradigm for constructing maliciously-secure MPC protocols, with a crucial twist. Recall that the GMW paradigm transforms a semi-honest MPC protocol into a maliciously secure one using the following three steps: (1) first, the parties commit to their inputs and random tapes. (2) Next, the parties perform coin-tossing to establish an unbiased random tape for each party. (3) Finally, the parties run the semi-honest MPC protocol where along with every message, each party also gives zero-knowledge proof of “honest” behavior consistent with the committed input and random tape.
Both steps (2) and (3) above introduce additional rounds of interaction, and constitute the main bottleneck towards constructing round-optimal MPC.
Main Ideas. Towards this, we develop two key modifications to the GMW compiler:
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1.
“One-shot” proof: Instead of requiring the parties to give a proof of honest behavior in each round of the underlying semi-honest protocol, we use a “delayed verification” technique where the parties prove honest behavior only once, towards the end of the protocol. As we explain below, this allows us to limit the overhead of additional rounds introduced by zero-knowledge proofs in the GMW compiler.
The idea of delayed verification was previously developed in the work of Chandran et. al. [8]. Interestingly, while they used this technique to achieve security in the setting of covert computation [8, 40], we use this technique to minimize the round complexity of our protocol.
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2.
No coin tossing: Second, we eliminate the coin-tossing step (i.e., step 2). Note that by removing coin-tossing, we implicitly allow the adversarial parties to potentially use “bad” randomness in the protocol. To ensure security in this scenario, we will use a special semi-honest MPC protocol that is secure against bad randomness. This idea has previously been used in many works (see, e.g., [3, 31]).
We now elaborate on the first step, which constitutes the conceptual core of our work. We consider semi-honest MPC protocols with a specific structure consisting of two phases: (a) Computation phase: in the first phase of the protocol, the parties compute the function such that each party obtains a secret-share of the output. (b) Output phase: In the second phase, the parties exchange their output shares with each other to compute the final output. This phase consists of only one round and is deterministic. Note that standard MPC protocols such as [16] follow this structure.
At a high-level, we implement our delayed verification strategy as follows: the parties first run the computation phase of the semi-honest protocol “as is” without giving any proofs. At the end of this phase, each party gives a single proof that it behaved honestly throughout the computation phase (using the committed input and random tape). If all the proofs verify, then the parties execute the output phase.
Right away, one may notice a glaring problem in the above approach. If the computation phase is executed without any proof of honest behavior, the adversary may behave maliciously in this phase and potentially learn the honest party inputs even before the output phase begins! Indeed, standard semi-honest MPC protocols do not guarantee security in such a setting.
To combat this problem, we develop a special purpose semi-honest MPC protocol that remains “partially immune” to malicious behavior. Specifically, such a protocol maintains privacy against malicious adversaries until the end of the computation phase. However, output correctness is not guaranteed if the adversary behaved maliciously in the computation phase. We refer to such an MPC protocol as robust semi-honest MPC. Later, we describe a four-round construction of robust semi-honest MPC where the first three rounds correspond to the computation phase and the last round constitutes the output phase.
Note that the robustness property as described above perfectly suits our requirements because in our compiled protocol, the output phase is executed only after each party has proven that it behaved honestly during the computation phase. This ensures full security of our compiled protocol.
A New Template for Malicious MPC. Putting the above ideas together, we obtain the following new template for maliciously-secure MPC:
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First, each party commits to its input and randomness using both a three-round extractable commitment schemeFootnote 3, and a non-interactive commitment scheme. In parallel, the parties also execute the computation phase of a four-round robust semi-honest MPC.
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Next, each party proves to every other party that it behaved honestly during the first three rounds.
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Finally, the parties execute the output phase of the robust semi-honest MPC and once again prove that their message is honestly computed.
In order to obtain a five round protocol from this template, we need to parallelize the proofs with the other protocol messages. For this purpose, we use delayed-input proofs [29] where the instance is only required in the last round.Footnote 4 In particular, we use four-round delayed input zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs whose first three messages are executed in parallel with the first three rounds of the robust semi-honest MPC. This yields us a five round protocol.
We remark that during simulation, our simulator is able to extract the adversary’s input only at the end of the third round. This means that we need to simulate the first three rounds of the robust semi-honest MPC without knowledge of the adversary’s input (or the function output). Our robust semi-honest MPC satisfies this property; namely, the simulator for our robust semi-honest MPC needs the adversary’s input and randomness (and the function output) only to simulate the output phase.
Four Rounds: Main Ideas. We next turn to the problem of constructing four-round MPC. At first, it is not clear how to obtain a four round protocol using the above template. Indeed, as argued earlier, we cannot afford to execute the output phase without verifying that the parties behaved honestly during the computation phase. In the above template, the output phase is executed after this verification is completed. Since three-round zero-knowledge proofs with polynomial-time simulation are not known presently, the verification process in the above protocol requires four rounds. Therefore, it may seem that that we are limited to a five round protocol.
Towards that, we note that our robust semi-honest MPC (described later) satisfies the following property: in order to simulate the view of the adversary (w.r.t. the correct output), the simulator only needs to “cheat” in the output phase (i.e., the last round). In particular, the simulation of the computation phase can be done “honestly” using random inputs for the honest parties. In this case, we do not need full-fledged ZK proofs to establish honest behavior in the computation phase; instead, we only need strong witness indistinguishable (WI) proofs. Recall that in a strong WI proof system, for any two indistinguishable instance distributions \(D_1\) and \(D_2\), a proof for \(x_1\leftarrow D_1\) using a witness \(w_1\) is indistinguishable from a proof for \(x_2\leftarrow D_2\) using a witness \(w_2\). This suffices for us because using strong WI, we can switch from an honest execution of the computation phase using the real inputs of the honest parties to another honest execution of the computation phase using random inputs for the honest parties.
Recently, Jain et al. [25] constructed three-round delayed-input strong WI proofs of knowledge from the DDH assumption. However, their proof system only guarantees strong WI property if the entire statement is chosen by the prover in the last round. In our case, this is unfortunately not true, and hence we cannot use their construction. Therefore, we take a different route, albeit at the cost of sub-exponential hardness assumptions. Specifically, we observe that by relying upon sub-exponential hardness, we can easily construct a three-round (delayed-input) strong WI argument by combining any three-round (delayed-input) WI proof of knowledge with a one or two-message “trapdoor phase” in our simultaneous message setting. For example, let f be a one-way permutation. The trapdoor phase can be implemented by having the verifier send \(y=f(x)\) for a random x in parallel with the first prover message. The statement of the WI proof of knowledge is changed to: either the original statement is true or the prover knows x.
Now, by running in exponential time in the hybrids, we can break the one-way permutation to recover x and then prove knowledge of x. This allows us to switch from honest execution of the computation phase using the real inputs of the honest parties to another honest execution using random inputs. After this switch, we can go back to proving the honest statement which can be done in polynomial time. This ensures that our final simulator is also polynomial time.
Handling Non-malleability Issues. So far, we ignored non-malleability related issues in our discussion. However, as noted in many prior works, zero-knowledge proofs with standard soundness guarantee do not suffice in the setting of constant-round MPC. Indeed, since proofs are being executed in parallel, we need to ensure that an adversary’s proofs remain sound even when the honest party’s proofs are being simulated [39].
We handle such malleability issues by using the techniques developed in a large body of prior works. In our five round MPC protocol, we use a slight variant of the four-round non-malleable zero-knowledge (NMZK) argument of [9] to ensure that adversary’s proofs remain sound even during simulation.Footnote 5 We make non-black-box use of their protocol in our security proof. More specifically, following prior works such as [5, 13, 19, 21], we establish a “soundness lemma” to ensure that the adversary is behaving honestly across the hybrids. We use the extractability property of the non-malleable commitment used inside the non-malleable zero-knowledge argument to prove this property.
In our four round protocol, we use the above NMZK to prove honest behavior in the output phase. In order to prove honest behavior in the computation phase, we use a slightly modified version of the strong WI argument system described above which additionally uses either a three-round [22] or two-round [28] non-malleable commitment scheme with extractability to achieve the desired non-malleability properties. Unlike the five round construction, here, we rely upon complexity leveraging in several of the hybrids to argue the “soundness lemma” as well as to tackle some delicate rewinding-related issues that are commonplace in such proofs.Footnote 6 We refer the reader to the technical sections for details.
Robust Semi-honest MPC. We now briefly describe the high-level ideas in our four-round construction of robust semi-honest MPC for general functionalities. Towards this, we note that it suffices to achieve a simpler goal of constructing robust semi-honest MPC for a restricted class of functionalities, namely, for computing randomized encodings.Footnote 7 That is, in order to construct a robust MPC for a \(n\)-party functionality \(F\), it suffices to construct a robust MPC for a \(n\)-functionality \(F_{rnd}\) that takes as input \((x_1,r_1;\cdots ;x_{n},r_{n})\) and outputs a randomized encoding of \(F(x_1,\ldots ,x_{n})\) using randomness \(r_1 \oplus \cdots \oplus r_{n}\). This is because all the parties can jointly execute the protocol for \(F_{rnd}\) to obtain the randomized encoding. Each party can then individually execute the decoding algorithm of the randomized encoding to recover the output \(F(x_1,\ldots ,x_{n})\). Note that this transformation preserves round complexity.
To construct a robust semi-honest \(n\)-party protocol for \(F_{rnd}\), we consider a specific type of randomized encoding defined in [2]. In particular, they construct a degree 3 randomizing polynomialsFootnote 8 for arbitrary functionalities based on low-depth pseudorandom generators. In their construction, every output bit of the encoding can be computed by a degree 3 polynomial on the input and the randomness. Hence, we further break down the goal of constructing a protocol for \(F_{rnd}\) into the following steps:
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Step 1: Construct a robust semi-honest MPC 3-party protocol for computing degree 3 terms. In particular, at the end of the protocol, every party who participated in the protocol get a secret share \(x_1x_2x_3\), where \(x_{q}\) is the \(q^{th}\) party’s input for \(q \in \{1,2,3\}\). The randomness for the secret sharing comes from the parties in the protocol.
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Step 2: Using Step 1, construct a robust semi-honest MPC protocol to compute degree 3 polynomials.
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Step 3: Using Step 2, construct a robust semi-honest MPC protocol for \(F_{rnd}\).
Steps 2 and 3 can be achieved using standard transformations and these transformations are round preserving. Thus, it suffices to achieve Step 1 in four rounds. Suppose \(P_{1},P_{2}\) and \(P_{3}\) participate in the protocol. Roughly, the protocol proceeds as follows: \(P_{1}\) and \(P_{2}\) perform a two message covert OT protocol to receive a share of \(x_1x_2\). Then, \(P_{1}\) and \(P_{3}\) perform a two message OT protocol to receive a share of \(x_1x_2x_3\). We need to do more work to ensure that at the end, all of them have shares of \(x_1x_2x_3\). Further, the robustness guarantee is argued using the covert security of the OT protocol. We refer the reader to the technical sections for more details.
1.3 Concurrent Work
In a concurrent and independent work, Brakerski et al. [7] construct a maliciously-secure 4-round MPC protocol based on the sub-exponential hardness of the Learning with Errors (LWE) problem and on the adaptive commitments of [33]. Their approach is very different from ours, most notably in the initial step, in that they construct and use a 3-round protocol against semi-malicious adversaries from LWE, while we construct and use a robust semi-honest MPC protocol from DDH.
1.4 Related Work
The study of constant-round protocols for MPC was initiated by Beaver et al. [6]. Their constructed constant-round MPC protocols in the presence of honest majority. Subsequently, a long sequence of works constructed constant-round MPC protocols against dishonest majority based on a variety of assumptions and techniques (see, e.g., [18, 27, 34, 35, 41]). Very recently, Garg et al. [14] constructed five round MPC using indistinguishability obfuscation and three-round parallel non-malleable commitments. They also construct a six-round MPC protocol using learning with errors (LWE) assumption and three-round parallel non-malleable commitments. All of these results are in the plain model where no trusted setup assumptions are available.
Asharov et al. [3] constructed three round MPC protocols in the CRS model. Subsequently, two-round MPC protocols in the CRS model were constructed by Garg et al. [11] using indistinguishability obfuscation, and by Mukherjee and Wichs [31] using LWE assumption.
1.5 Full Version
Due to space constraints, much of the details of the security proofs for our constructions are omitted from this manuscript. The full version of the paper is available at [1].