Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: New Constructions for Garbled Computation

安全多方计算（MPC）是密码学的一个庞大且不断发展的分支领域，它使互不信任的各方能够共同评估其私有数据上的功能。MPC的一个令人兴奋的承诺是能够将这样的函数编写为通用程序，然后安全地对它们进行计算。这将使即使是非加密专家也能自动增强具有强大安全属性的普通软件。由于在MPC中有效执行普通程序的障碍，实现这一目标的工具已被证明是难以捉摸的。关键的障碍是如何有效地处理随机存取存储器（RAM）。RAM在计算中无处不在，但众所周知，RAM的高效MPC处理是一个顽固的挑战。该项目将显著改善RAM的MPC处理，从而实现更高效的通用MPC工具。乱码RAM （GRAM）是一种功能强大的MPC原语，它从具有RAM访问的程序的MPC中消除了交互性（从而减少了昂贵的延迟）。最近的GRAM技术克服了GRAM效率的几个长期障碍，并恢复了进一步显著改进的希望。研究人员将抓住机会，探索和实施新的GRAM技术。该项目的范围很广，包括提高GRAM的效率，将GRAM引入更丰富的设置，理解GRAM的理论和实践限制，改进构建高效GRAM所需的加密假设，以及实现软件原型。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) is a large and growing subfield of cryptography that enables mutually untrusting parties to jointly evaluate functions on their private data. One exciting promise of MPC is the ability to write such functions as general programs and then evaluate them securely. This would enable even non-crypto-specialists to automatically augment ordinary software with powerful security properties. Tools for achieving this goal have proven elusive, due to barriers to efficiently executing ordinary programs inside MPC. The critical barrier is in efficiently handling random access memory (RAM). RAM is ubiquitous in computing, but efficient MPC handling of RAM is well known as a stubborn challenge. This project will significantly improve MPC handling of RAM, thus enabling far more efficient general-purpose MPC tools.Garbled RAM (GRAM) is a powerful MPC primitive that removes interactivity (and hence costly latency) from MPC of programs with RAM accesses. Recent GRAM techniques overcame several long-standing obstacles to GRAM efficiency and restored hope for significant further improvement. The investigators will seize the opportunity, and will explore and implement novel GRAM techniques. The project’s scope is broad, and includes improving GRAM efficiency, bringing GRAM to richer settings, understanding GRAM’s theoretical and practical limitations, improving the cryptographic assumptions needed to construct efficient GRAM, and implementing software prototypes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.