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MPC-ABC: Blockchain-Based Network Communication for Efficiently Secure Multiparty Computation

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Abstract

Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) offers privacy-preserving computation that could be critical in many health and finance applications. Specifically, two or more parties jointly compute a function on private inputs by following a protocol executed in rounds. The MPC network typically consists of direct peer-to-peer (P2P) connections among parties. However, this significantly increases the computation time as parties need to wait for messages from each other, thus making network communication a bottleneck. Most recent works tried to address the communication efficiency by focusing on optimizing the MPC protocol rather than the underlying network topologies and protocols. In this paper, we propose the MPC over Algorand Blockchain (MPC-ABC) protocol that packs messages into Algorand transactions and utilizes its fast gossip protocol to transmit them efficiently among MPC parties. Our approach, therefore, reduces the delay and complexity associated with the fully connected P2P network while assuring the integrity of broadcasted data. We implemented MPC-ABC and utilized it to outsource the SPDZ (SPDZ—pronounced “Speedz"—is the nickname of the MPC protocol of Damgård et al. in (European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, pp 1–18, 2013)) protocol across multiple Cloud Service Providers (CSP). Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the commonly adopted approaches over the P2P TCP/IP network in terms of the average delay and network complexity.

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Funding

This research was supported in part by the Air Force Research Laboratory/Information Directorate (AFRL/RI), contract number FA8750-21-2-0505, and the U.S. National Science Foundation, award number US-NSF-1663051.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Florida International University, Miami, FL, 33174, USA

    Oscar G. Bautista, Richard Hernandez, Kemal Akkaya & Selcuk Uluagac

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85721, USA

    Mohammad Hossein Manshaei

  3. Information Warfare Division, Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome, NY, USA

    Soamar Homsi

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  1. Oscar G. Bautista
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  3. Richard Hernandez
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Contributions

OB developed the Python application used to evaluate the proposed approach and compare it with existing approaches. He also ran most experiments, elaborated figures and tables, and wrote more than 50% of the paper. HM deployed the first private Algorand network, provided the initial ideas to improve communication efficiency with Algorand, and wrote the delay analysis subsection. RH expanded, maintained, and customized the private Algorand network throughout the research. KA and SU elaborated the proposal to obtain funding and provided guidance and recommendations throughout the research. SH provided comments and feedback after iterations of experiments. All authors edited the manuscript across several rounds.

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Correspondence to Oscar G. Bautista.

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Bautista, O.G., Manshaei, M.H., Hernandez, R. et al. MPC-ABC: Blockchain-Based Network Communication for Efficiently Secure Multiparty Computation. J Netw Syst Manage 31, 68 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-023-09739-y

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