Secure Two-Party Research Articles

Fairness in the presence of semi-rational parties in rational two-party secure computation

Reputation is commonly used in game theory for mutual cooperation. Assuming that parties value their reputation as well as their payoffs just like people in the real world, this paper considers reputation assumptions when defining the utilities. The new utility consists of two parts: the reputation part and payoff part. The parties are redefined according to the new utility definition. Besides, to represent a more realistic adversary model, a new adversary named semi-rational party is proposed. The semi-rational parties behave like the combination of rational and covert parties. At last, a rational two-party secure computation protocol is constructed. The proof of fairness in the presence of the semi-rational party is stressed in this paper.

Complete Fairness in Secure Two-Party Computation

In the setting of secure two-party computation, two mutually distrusting parties wish to compute some function of their inputs while preserving, to the extent possible, various security properties such as privacy, correctness, and more. One desirable property is fairness which guarantees, informally, that if one party receives its output, then the other party does too. Cleve [1986] showed that complete fairness cannot be achieved in general without an honest majority. Since then, the accepted folklore has been that nothing non-trivial can be computed with complete fairness in the two-party setting. We demonstrate that this folklore belief is false by showing completely fair protocols for various nontrivial functions in the two-party setting based on standard cryptographic assumptions. We first show feasibility of obtaining complete fairness when computing any function over polynomial-size domains that does not contain an “embedded XOR”; this class of functions includes boolean AND/OR as well as Yao’s “millionaires’ problem”. We also demonstrate feasibility for certain functions that do contain an embedded XOR, though we prove a lower bound showing that any completely fair protocol for such functions must have round complexity super-logarithmic in the security parameter. Our results demonstrate that the question of completely fair secure computation without an honest majority is far from closed.

Provably Secure Two-Party Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol in eCK Model

How to construct secure key agreement protocol is one of the most challenging problems in information security area.However,most of the current secure protocols can only achieve "heuristic" security,the security assumptions and efficiencies of these protocols are not perfect.To solve these problems,the authors propose a new 2 rounds two-party authenticated key agreement protocol and point out some principles to construct a secure protocol by analyzing the security properties of the protocol,then prove strictly that the new protocol is secure in eCK model.According to pertinent literature,eCK model provides the strongest definition of security for two party key agreement protocol at present.Performance analysis shows that the protocol has a good balance between computational cost and security assumption.The authors also present a three-round variant of the protocol to realize key conformation property.

Secure Two-Party Association Rule Mining Based on One-Pass FP-Tree

Frequent Path tree (FP-tree) is a popular method to compute association rules and is faster than Apriori-based solutions in some cases. Association rule mining using FP-tree method cannot ensure entire privacy since frequency of the itemsets are required to share among participants at the first stage. Moreover, FP-tree method requires two scans of database transactions which may not be the best solution if the database is very large or the database server does not allow multiple scans. In addition, one-pass FP-tree can accommodate continuous or periodically changing databases without restarting the process as opposed to a regular FP-tree based solution. In this paper, the authors propose a one-pass FP-tree method to perform association rule mining without compromising any data privacy among two parties. A fully homomorphic encryption system over integer numbers is applied to ensure secure computation among two data sites without disclosing any number belongs to themselves.

Partial Fairness in Secure Two-Party Computation

A protocol for secure computation is fair if either both parties learn the output or else neither party does. A seminal result of Cleve (STOC ’86) is that, in general, complete fairness is impossible to achieve in two-party computation. In light of this, various techniques for obtaining partial fairness have been suggested in the literature. We propose a definition of partial fairness within the standard real-/ideal-world paradigm. We also show broad feasibility results with respect to our definition: partial fairness is possible for any (randomized) functionality f:X×Y→Z 1×Z 2 at least one of whose domains or ranges is polynomial in size. Our protocols are always private, and when one of the domains has polynomial size our protocols also achieve the usual notion of security with abort. We work in the standard communication model (in particular, we do not assume simultaneous channels) and, in contrast to some prior work, rely only on standard cryptographic assumptions (e.g., enhanced trapdoor permutations). We also show that, as far as general feasibility is concerned, our results are optimal. Specifically, there exist functions with super-polynomial domains and ranges for which it is impossible to achieve our definition.

Secure Two-party Protocols for Point Inclusion Problem

It is well known that, in theory, the general secure multiparty computation problem is solvable using circuit evaluation protocols. However, the communication complexity of the resulting protocols depend on the size of the circuit that expresses the functionality to be computed and hence can be impractical. Hence special solutions are needed for specific problems for efficiency reasons. The point inclusion problem in computational geometry is a special multiparty computation and has got many applications. Previous protocols for the secure point inclusion problem are not adequate. In this paper we modify some known solutions to the point inclusion problem in computational geometry to the frame work of secure two-party computation.

Completeness in Two-Party Secure Computation: A Computational View

A Secure Function Evaluation (SFE) of a two-variable function f(·,·) is a protocol that allows two parties with inputs x and y to evaluate f(x,y) in a manner where neither party learns "more than is necessary". A rich body of work deals with the study of completeness for secure two-party computation. A function f is complete for SFE if a protocol for securely evaluating f allows the secure evaluation of all (efficiently computable) functions. The questions investigated are which functions are complete for SFE, which functions have SFE protocols unconditionally and whether there are functions that are neither complete nor have efficient SFE protocols. The previous study of these questions was mainly conducted from an information theoretic point of view and provided strong answers in the form of combinatorial properties. However, we show that there are major differences between the information theoretic and computational settings. In particular, we show functions that are considered as having SFE unconditionally by the combinatorial criteria but are actually complete in the computational setting. We initiate the fully computational study of these fundamental questions. Somewhat surprisingly, we manage to provide an almost full characterization of the complete functions in this model as well. More precisely, we present a computational criterion (called computational row non-transitivity) for a function f to be complete for the asymmetric case. Furthermore, we show a matching criterion called computational row transitivity for f to have a simple SFE (based on no additional assumptions). This criterion is close to the negation of the computational row non-transitivity and thus we essentially characterize all "nice" functions as either complete or having SFE unconditionally.

Implications of superstrong non-locality for cryptography

Non-local boxes are hypothetical ‘machines’ that give rise to superstrong non-local correlations, leading to a stronger violation of Bell/Clauser, Horne, Shimony & Holt inequalities than is possible within the framework of quantum mechanics. We show how non-local boxes can be used to perform any two-party secure computation. We first construct a protocol for bit commitment and then show how to achieve oblivious transfer using non-local boxes. Both have been shown to be impossible using quantum mechanics alone.

Oblivious transfer using quantum entanglement

Based on quantum entanglement, an all-or-nothing oblivious transfer (OT) protocol is proposed and is proven to be secure. The distinct merit of the present protocol lies in that it is not based on quantum bit commitment. More intriguingly, this OT protocol does not belong to a class of protocols denied by Lo's no-go theorem of one-sided two-party secure computation, and thus its security can be achieved.

Parallel Coin-Tossing and Constant-Round Secure Two-Party Computation

In this paper we show that any two-party functionality can be securely computed in a constant number of rounds , where security is obtained against (polynomial-time) malicious adversaries that may arbitrarily deviate from the protocol specification. This is in contrast to Yao's constant-round protocol that ensures security only in the face of semi-honest adversaries, and to its malicious adversary version that requires a polynomial number of rounds. In order to obtain our result, we present a constant-round protocol for secure coin-tossing of polynomially many coins (in parallel). We then show how this protocol can be used in conjunction with other existing constructions in order to obtain a constant-round protocol for securely computing any two-party functionality. On the subject of coin-tossing, we also present a constant-round almost perfect coin-tossing protocol, where by ``almost perfect'' we mean that the resulting coins are guaranteed to be statistically close to uniform (and not just pseudorandom).

Insecurity of quantum secure computations

It had been widely claimed that quantum mechanics can protect private information during public decision in, for example, the so-called two-party secure computation. If this were the case, quantum smart-cards, storing confidential information accessible only to a proper reader, could prevent fake teller machines from learning the PIN (personal identification number) from the customers' input. Although such optimism has been challenged by the recent surprising discovery of the insecurity of the so-called quantum bit commitment, the security of quantum two-party computation itself remains unaddressed. Here I answer this question directly by showing that all one-sided two-party computations (which allow only one of the two parties to learn the result) are necessarily insecure. As corollaries to my results, quantum one-way oblivious password identification and the so-called quantum one-out-of-two oblivious transfer are impossible. I also construct a class of functions that cannot be computed securely in any two-sided two-party computation. Nevertheless, quantum cryptography remains useful in key distribution and can still provide partial security in ``quantum money'' proposed by Wiesner.