Concretely efficient secure multi-party computation protocols: survey and more

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. Furthermore, 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.