Coin-based Secure Computations

Abstract

AbstractIn the history of cryptography, many cryptographic protocols have relied on random coin tosses to prove their security. Although flipping coins is indispensable in this manner, the coins themselves have never been in the spotlight. Therefore, we would like to make physical coins rise to the level of cryptography, just as a deck of physical playing cards has been used to perform a secure multi-party computation. Such a card-based protocol is known to be helpful both to perform a secure computation without any black-box computers and to understand the principles of secure protocols. In this paper, we propose a new framework of secure multi-party computation using physical coins, named a coin-based protocol. One advantage of the use of coins is that they are more ubiquitous than cards. Whereas a face-down card can conceal the information about its face side, one side of a coin reveals the information of its other side. Hence, more careful design is required for a secure coin-based protocol than for a card-based one. We formalize a computational model of the coin-based protocol and explicitly give protocols for NOT, AND, COPY, OR, and XOR computations. We also discuss the composability of the extended protocols and how to implement them in practice.