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SecFloatPlus: More Accurate Floating-Point Meets Secure Two-Party Computation

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Provable and Practical Security (ProvSec 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14903))

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Abstract

Implementing secure two-party computation (2PC) protocols with floating-point numbers, balancing accuracy and efficiency, has been challenging. Despite advancements with SecFloat (in IEEE S&P’22) and Beacon (in USENIX Security’23), there is room for improvement in precision, efficiency and functionality. This paper introduces SecFloatPlus, which complements SecFloat with a new spline generation approach for implementing efficient and accurate 2PC-enabled mathematical functions. It significantly enhances accuracy, achieving up to \(1000 \times \) better performance for the hyperbolic tangent function (i.e., tanh) and \(6 \times \) better performance for the Gaussian Error Linear Unit (GELU) function, compared to Beacon. It also introduces precise inverse trigonometric functions (i.e., arcsin, arccos and arctan) which are never implemented by previous works. Besides, when integrated into secure transformer inference, SecFloatPlus outperforms SecFloat in runtime efficiency and communication cost for the SoftMax activation function, while maintaining precision.

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Acknowledgements

The work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 62332007, U22B2028, 62302192, U23A20303 and 62032025), the Science and Technology Major Project of Tibetan Autonomous Region of China (No. XZ202201ZD0006G), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (No. 2024A1515010086), and the Science and Technology Program of Guangzhou (No. 2024A04J3691), National Joint Engineering Research Center of Network Security Detection and Protection Technology, Guangdong Key Laboratory of Data Security and Privacy Preserving, Guangdong Hong Kong Joint Laboratory for Data Security and Privacy Protection, and Engineering Research Center of Trustworthy AI, Ministry of Education. The authors are very grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments and suggestions regarding this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jinan University, Guangzhou, China

    Tao Huang, Jian Weng, Jiasi Weng & Ming Li

  2. South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China

    Minrong Chen

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  1. Tao Huang
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Correspondence to Jian Weng .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

    Joseph K. Liu

  2. University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, UK

    Liqun Chen

  3. Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Shi-Feng Sun

  4. RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Xiaoning Liu

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Huang, T., Weng, J., Weng, J., Chen, M., Li, M. (2025). SecFloatPlus: More Accurate Floating-Point Meets Secure Two-Party Computation. In: Liu, J.K., Chen, L., Sun, SF., Liu, X. (eds) Provable and Practical Security. ProvSec 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14903. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-0954-3_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-0954-3_1

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