Security and Safety, Vol. 1, 2021001 (2022)
https://doi.org/10.1051/sands/2021001
sands.edpsciences.org
Information Network
Concretely efficient secure multi-party computation
protocols: survey and more
Dengguo Feng
1,2
and Kang Yang
1,∗
1
State Key Laboratory of Cryptology, Beijing 100878, China
2
State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences,
Beijing 100190, China
Received: 11 October 2021 / Revised: 5 November 2021 / Accepted: 6 December 2021 / Published online: 14 June 2022
Abstract Secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows a set of parties to jointly compute
a function on their private inputs, and reveals nothing but the output of the function. In the
last decade, MPC has rapidly moved from a purely theoretical study to an object of practical
interest, with a growing interest in practical applications such as privacy-preserving machine
learning (PPML). In this paper, we comprehensively survey existing work on concretely
efficient MPC protocols with both semi-honest and malicious security, in both dishonest-
majority and honest-majority settings. We focus on considering the notion of security with
abort, meaning that corrupted parties could prevent honest parties from receiving output
after they receive output. We present high-level ideas of the basic and key approaches for
designing different styles of MPC protocols and the crucial building blocks of MPC. For
MPC applications, we compare the known PPML protocols built on MPC, and describe the
efficiency of private inference and training for the state-of-the-art PPML protocols. Further-
more, we summarize several challenges and open problems to break though the efficiency of
MPC protocols as well as some interesting future work that is worth being addressed. This
survey aims to provide the recent development and key approaches of MPC to researchers,
who are interested in knowing, improving, and applying concretely efficient MPC protocols.
Keywords Secure multi-party computation, Privacy-preserving machine learning, Secret
sharings, Garbled circuits, Oblivious transfer and its arithmetic generalization
Citation Feng D and Yang K. Concretely efficient secure multi-party computation proto-
cols: survey and more. Security and Safety 2022; 1: 2021001. https://doi.org/10.1051/sands/
2021001
1 Introduction
Secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows a set of parties to jointly compute a function on their
private inputs without revealing anything but the output of the function. Specifically, MPC allows n
parties to jointly compute the following function:
(y
1
, . . . , y
n
) ← f(x
1
, . . . , x
n
),
where every party P
i
holds an input x
i
, obtains an output y
i
, and can learn nothing except for (x
i
, y
i
, f ),
and function f is often modeled as a Boolean or arithmetic circuit. MPC is a foundation of cryptography,
and is also a core technology to protect privacy of data for cooperative computing in the big data era.
*
Corresponding author (email: yangk@sklc.org)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
© The Author(s) 2022. Published by EDP Sciences and China Science Publishing & Media Ltd.