TWC: Medium: Collaborative Research: Transformative New Approaches to Efficient Secure Computation

安全计算是密码学中的一个强大概念，它支持在缺乏信任的情况下进行协作。尽管它在解决协作情况下的实际问题方面具有很大的潜力，但它尚未在实践中得到广泛采用。事实上，直到最近才有一些安全计算协议的实际实现，甚至最近的实现也为了效率而被迫将自己限制在较弱的安全形式。这是因为自第一个这样的协议发明以来，实现强安全性的主要范例依赖于零知识证明，并且产生的协议即使对于简单的计算也过于低效。我们正在为高效的安全计算协议开发完全不同的新架构，这些协议绕过了对这种零知识证明的需求。我们的体系结构基于一种新的原则方法来开发新的安全计算协议，从而对现代密码学的理论和实践产生影响。我们的研究将确定简单协议中固有的新的（部分）安全属性，并研究如何通过精心开发的组合协议的方法将这些属性添加到强大的安全保证中。安全多方计算是一个时代已经到来的想法，正如世界上几个致力于将理论结果转化为实际实现的项目所证明的那样，以及在密码学之外寻求利用它的研究项目的数量。安全计算协议的广泛可用性和部署有可能成为一种颠覆性技术，在敏感信息领域开辟新的合作途径。除了技术影响之外，我们还通过将我们的研究整合到研究生和本科教育以及外展工作中，努力将密码学的进步带给更广泛的计算机科学受众。

Secure Computation is a powerful concept from cryptography that enables collaboration in the absence of trust. Despite its great potential for solving practical problems in collaborative situations, it has not yet been widely adopted in practice. Indeed, until recently there were few practical implementations of secure computation protocols, and even recent implementations were forced to restrict themselves to weak forms of security for the sake of efficiency. This is because the dominant paradigm for achieving strong security, since the invention of the first such protocols, has relied on zero-knowledge proofs, and yields protocols that are too inefficient even for simple computations.We are developing radically different new architectures for efficient secure computation protocols that bypass the need for such zero-knowledge proofs. Our architectures are based on a novel principled approach to developing new secure computation protocols, with consequences to the theory and practice of modern cryptography. Our research will identify new (partial) security properties inherent in simple protocols, and study how such properties can add up to strong security guarantees through carefully developed methods for composing protocols.Secure multiparty computation is an idea whose time has come, as evidenced by the several projects around the world engaged in translating the theoretical results to practical implementations, and the number of research projects outside cryptography that seek to exploit it. Widespread availability and deployment of secure computation protocols has the potential to be a disruptive technology, enabling new avenues of cooperation in areas with sensitive information. Apart from the technological impact, we strive to bring the advances in cryptography to a broader computer science audience, by integrating our research into graduate and undergraduate education, and outreach efforts.