International Association
for Cryptologic Research

A recent line of work, Stacked Garbled Circuit (SGC), showed that Garbled Circuit (GC) can be improved for functions that include conditional behavior. SGC relieves the communication bottleneck of 2PC by only sending enough garbled material for a single branch out of the $b$ total branches. Hence, communication is sublinear in the circuit size. However, both the evaluator and the generator pay in computation and perform at least factor $\log b$ extra work as compared to standard GC evaluation. We extend the sublinearity of SGC to also include the work performed by the GC Evaluator E; thus we achieve a fully sublinear E, which is essential when optimizing for the online phase. We formalize our approach as a garbling scheme called GCWise: GC WIth Sublinear Evaluator. We show one attractive and immediate application, Garbled PIR, a primitive that marries GC with Private Information Retrieval. Garbled PIR allows the GC to non-interactively and sublinearly access a privately indexed element from a publicly known database, and then use this element in continued GC evaluation.

We revisit the problem of constant-round malicious secure two-party computation by considering the use of simple correlations, namely sources of correlated randomness that can be securely generated with sublinear communication complexity and good concrete efficiency. The current state-of-the-art protocol of Katz et al. (Crypto 2018) achieves malicious security by realizing a variant of the authenticated garbling functionality of Wang et al. (CCS 2017). Given oblivious transfer correlations, the communication cost of this protocol (with 40 bits of statistical security) is comparable to roughly 10 garbled circuits (GCs). This protocol inherently requires more than 2 rounds of interaction. In this work, we use other kinds of simple correlations to realize the authenticated garbling functionality with better efficiency. Concretely, we get the following reduced costs in the random oracle model: - Using variants of both vector oblivious linear evaluation (VOLE) and multiplication triples (MT), we reduce the cost to 1.31 GCs. - Using only variants of VOLE, we reduce the cost to 2.25 GCs. - Using only variants of MT, we obtain a non-interactive (i.e., 2-message) protocol with cost comparable to 7.47 GCs. Finally, we show that by using recent constructions of pseudorandom correlation generators (Boyle et al., CCS 2018, Crypto 2019, 2020), the simple correlations consumed by our protocols can be securely realized without forming an efficiency bottleneck.