Understanding Fairness in Secure Two-Party and Multi-Party Computation

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In the setting of secure computation, a set of mutually distrusting parties wish to compute some function of their inputs while preserving security properties such as privacy, correctness, etc. One important property is fairness, which roughly means that if anyone learns the result of the computation, then everyone does.It has been known since the mid-1980s that complete fairness is impossible, in general, without a strict majority of honest parties. For over 20 years, the accepted folklore has been that nothing non-trivial can be computed with complete fairness without an honest majority. Recent work of the PI and others shows that this folklore is false, and demonstrates that the question of fairness in secure computation is wide open.This project seeks to expand the initial feasibility results (or prove corresponding impossibility results) and to develop a better understanding of fairness in cryptographic protocols more generally. This includes work on partial fairness, as well as exploring rationality as a means of obtaining fairness. The educational component of this project will focus on graduate student education and outreach efforts to the broader research community.