International Association
for Cryptologic Research

In the dishonest-majority setting, secure multiparty computation (MPC) with identifiable abort (IA) guarantees that honest parties can identify and agree upon at least one cheating party if the protocol does not produce an output. Known MPC constructions with IA rely on generic zero-knowledge proofs, adaptively secure oblivious transfer (OT) protocols, or homomorphic primitives, and thus incur a substantial penalty with respect to protocols that abort without identifiability. We introduce a new, weaker notion of IA called input-revealing IA (IRIA), which can be constructed through selective revealing of committed input values---a technique we call vindicating release. We show that this weaker form of IA can be achieved with small concrete overheads for many interesting protocols in the literature, including the pre-processing protocols needed for several state-of-the-art MPC protocols. We next show how to assemble these IRIA components into an MPC protocol for any functionality with standard IA. Such a realization differs minimally in terms of cost, techniques, and analysis from the equivalent realization that lacks identifiability, e.g., our total bandwidth overhead incurred is less than 2x, which is an asymptotic improvement over prior work on IA. On a practical level, we apply our techniques to the problem of threshold ECDSA, and show that the resulting protocol with standard IA is concretely efficient. On a theoretical level, we present a compiler that transforms any secure protocol into one with standard IA assuming only a variant of statically-corruptable ideal OT.

A central challenge in the study of MPC is to balance between security guarantees, hardness assumptions, and resources required for the protocol. In this work, we study the cost of tolerating adaptive corruptions in MPC protocols under various corruption thresholds. In the strongest setting, we consider adaptive corruptions of an arbitrary number of parties (potentially all) and achieve the following results: (1) A two-round secure function evaluation (SFE) protocol in the CRS model, assuming LWE and indistinguishability obfuscation (iO). The communication, the CRS size, and the online computation are sublinear in the size of the function. The iO assumption can be replaced by secure erasures. Previous results required either the communication or the CRS size to be polynomial in the function size. (2) Under the same assumptions, we construct a “Bob-optimized” 2PC (where Alice talks first, Bob second, and Alice learns the output). That is, the communication complexity and total computation of Bob are sublinear in the function size and in Alice’s input size. We prove impossibility of “Alice-optimized” protocols. (3) Assuming LWE, we bootstrap adaptively secure NIZK arguments to achieve proof size sublinear in the circuit size of the NP relation. On a technical level, our results are based on laconic function evaluation (LFE) (Quach, Wee, and Wichs, FOCS’18) and shed light on an interesting duality between LFE and FHE. Next, we analyze adaptive corruptions of all-but-one of the parties and show a two-round SFE protocol in the threshold-PKI model (where keys of a threshold FHE scheme are pre-shared among the parties) with communication complexity sublinear in the circuit size, assuming LWE and NIZK. Finally, we consider the honest-majority setting and show a two-round SFE protocol with guaranteed output delivery under the same constraints. Our results highlight that the asymptotic cost of adaptive security can be reduced to be comparable to, and in many settings almost match, that of static security, with only a little sacrifice to the concrete round complexity and asymptotic communication complexity.

The advent of blockchain protocols has reignited the interest in adaptively secure broadcast; it is by now well understood that broadcasting over a diffusion network allows an adaptive adversary to corrupt the sender depending on the message it attempts to send and change it. Hirt and Zikas [Eurocrypt '10] proved that this is an inherent limitation of broadcast in the simulation-based setting---i.e., this task is impossible against an adaptive adversary corrupting a majority of the parties (a task that is achievable against a static adversary). The contributions of this paper are two-fold. First, we show that, contrary to previous perception, the above limitation of adaptively secure broadcast is not an artifact of simulation-based security, but rather an inherent issue of adaptive security. In particular, we show that: (1) it also applies to the property-based broadcast definition adapted for adaptive adversaries, and (2) unlike other impossibilities in adaptive security, this impossibility cannot be circumvented by adding a programmable random oracle, in neither setting, property-based or simulation-based. Second, we turn to the resource-restricted cryptography (RRC) paradigm [Garay et al., Eurocrypt '20], which has proven useful in circumventing impossibility results, and ask whether it also affects the above negative result. We answer this question in the affirmative, by showing that time-lock puzzles (TLPs)---which can be viewed as an instance of RRC---indeed allow for achieving the property-based definition and circumvent the impossibility of adaptively secure broadcast. The natural question is then, do TLPs also allow for simulation-based adaptively secure broadcast against corrupted majorities? We answer this question in the negative. However, we show that a positive result can be achieved via a non-committing analogue of TLPs in the programmable random-oracle model. Importantly, and as a contribution of independent interest, we also present the first (limited) composition theorem in the resource-restricted setting, which is needed for the complexity-based, non-idealized treatment of TLPs in the context of other protocols.

Fully secure multiparty computation (MPC) allows a set of parties to compute some function of their inputs, while guaranteeing correctness, privacy, fairness, and output delivery. Understanding the necessary and sufficient assumptions that allow for fully secure MPC is an important goal. Cleve (STOC’86) showed that full security cannot be obtained in general without an honest majority. Conversely, by Rabin and Ben-Or (STOC’89), assuming a broadcast channel and an honest majority enables a fully secure computation of any function. Our goal is to characterize the set of functionalities that can be computed with full security, assuming an honest majority, but no broadcast. This question was fully answered by Cohen et al. (TCC’16)—for the restricted class of symmetric functionalities (where all parties receive the same output). Instructively, their results crucially rely on agreement and do not carry over to general asymmetric functionalities. In this work, we focus on the case of three-party asymmetric functionalities, providing a variety of necessary and sufficient conditions to enable fully secure computation. An interesting use-case of our results is server-aided computation, where an untrusted server helps two parties to carry out their computation. We show that without a broadcast assumption, the resource of an external non-colluding server provides no additional power. Namely, a functionality can be computed with the help of the server if and only if it can be computed without it. For fair coin tossing, we further show that the optimal bias for three-party (server-aided) r -round protocol remains $$\Theta \left( 1/r\right) $$ Θ 1 / r (as in the two-party setting).

Secure multiparty computation (MPC) on incomplete communication networks has been studied within two primary models: (1) where a partial network is fixed a priori, and thus corruptions can occur dependent on its structure, and (2) where edges in the communication graph are determined dynamically as part of the protocol. Whereas a rich literature has succeeded in mapping out the feasibility and limitations of graph structures supporting secure computation in the fixed-graph model (including strong classical lower bounds), these bounds do not apply in the latter dynamic-graph setting, which has recently seen exciting new results, but remains relatively unexplored. In this work, we initiate a similar foundational study of MPC within the dynamic-graph model. As a first step, we investigate the property of graph expansion . All existing protocols (implicitly or explicitly) yield communication graphs which are expanders, but it is not clear whether this is inherent. Our results consist of two types (for constant fraction of corruptions): Upper bounds: We demonstrate secure protocols whose induced communication graphs are not expander graphs, within a wide range of settings (computational, information theoretic, with low locality, even with low locality and adaptive security), each assuming some form of input-independent setup. Lower bounds: In the plain model (no setup) with adaptive corruptions, we demonstrate that for certain functionalities, no protocol can maintain a non-expanding communication graph against all adversarial strategies. Our lower bound relies only on protocol correctness (not privacy) and requires a surprisingly delicate argument. More generally, we provide a formal framework for analyzing the evolving communication graph of MPC protocols, giving a starting point for studying the relation between secure computation and further, more general graph properties.

The field of distributed certification is concerned with certifying properties of distributed networks, where the communication topology of the network is represented as an arbitrary graph; each node of the graph is a separate processor, with its own internal state. To certify that the network satisfies a given property, a prover assigns each node of the network a certificate, and the nodes then communicate with one another and decide whether to accept or reject. We require soundness and completeness: the property holds if and only if there exists an assignment of certificates to the nodes that causes all nodes to accept. Our goal is to minimize the length of the certificates, as well as the communication between the nodes of the network. Distributed certification has been extensively studied in the distributed computing community, but it has so far only been studied in the information-theoretic setting, where the prover and the network nodes are computationally unbounded. In this work we introduce and study computationally bounded distributed certification: we define locally verifiable distributed SNARG (LVDSNARGs), which are an analog of SNARGs for distributed networks, and are able to circumvent known hardness results for information-theoretic distributed certification by requiring both the prover and the verifier to be computationally efficient (namely, PPT algorithms). We give two LVDSNARG constructions: the first allows us to succinctly certify any network property in P, using a global prover that can see the entire network; the second construction gives an efficient distributed prover, which succinctly certifies the execution of any efficient distributed algorithm. Our constructions rely on non-interactive batch arguments for NP (BARGs) and on RAM SNARGs, which have recently been shown to be constructible from standard cryptographic assumptions.

It is well known that without randomization, Byzantine agreement (BA) requires a linear number of rounds in the synchronous setting, while it is flat out impossible in the asynchronous setting. The primitive which allows to bypass the above limitation is known as oblivious common coin (OCC). It allows parties to agree with constant probability on a random coin, where agreement is oblivious, i.e., players are not aware whether or not agreement has been achieved. The starting point of our work is the observation that no known protocol exists for information-theoretic multi-valued OCC with optimal resiliency in the asynchronous setting (with eventual message delivery). This apparent hole in the literature is particularly problematic, as multi-valued OCC is implicitly or explicitly used in several constructions. In this paper, we present the first information-theoretic multi-valued OCC protocol in the asynchronous setting with optimal resiliency, i.e., tolerating t<n/3 corruptions, thereby filling this important gap. Further, our protocol efficiently implements OCC with an exponential-size domain, a property which is not even achieved by known constructions in the simpler, synchronous setting. We then turn to the problem of round-preserving parallel composition of asynchronous BA. A protocol for this task was proposed by Ben-Or and El-Yaniv [Distributed Computing ’03]. Their construction, however, is flawed in several ways. Thus, as a second contribution, we provide a simpler, more modular protocol for the above task. Finally, and as a contribution of independent interest, we provide proofs in Canetti's Universal Composability framework; this makes our work the first one offering composability guarantees, which are important as BA is a core building block of secure multi-party computation protocols.

Byzantine agreement (BA), the task of n parties to agree on one of their input bits in the face of malicious agents, is a powerful primitive that lies at the core of a vast range of distributed protocols. Interestingly, in BA protocols with the best overall communication, the demands of the parties are highly unbalanced : the amortized cost is $${\tilde{O}}(1)$$ O ~ ( 1 ) bits per party, but some parties must send $$\Omega (n)$$ Ω ( n ) bits. In best known balanced protocols, the overall communication is sub-optimal, with each party communicating $${\tilde{O}}(\sqrt{n})$$ O ~ ( n ) . In this work, we ask whether asymmetry is inherent for optimizing total communication. In particular, is BA possible where each party communicates only $${\tilde{O}}(1)$$ O ~ ( 1 ) bits? Our contributions in this line are as follows: We define a cryptographic primitive— succinctly reconstructed distributed signatures (SRDS)—that suffices for constructing $${\tilde{O}}(1)$$ O ~ ( 1 ) balanced BA. We provide two constructions of SRDS from different cryptographic and public-key infrastructure (PKI) assumptions. The SRDS-based BA follows a paradigm of boosting from “almost-everywhere” agreement to full agreement, and does so in a single round. Complementarily, we prove that PKI setup and cryptographic assumptions are necessary for such protocols in which every party sends o ( n ) messages. We further explore connections between a natural approach toward attaining SRDS and average-case succinct non-interactive argument systems (SNARGs) for a particular type of NP-Complete problems (generalizing Subset-Sum and Subset-Product). Our results provide new approaches forward, as well as limitations and barriers, toward minimizing per-party communication of BA. In particular, we construct the first two BA protocols with $${\tilde{O}}(1)$$ O ~ ( 1 ) balanced communication, offering a trade-off between setup and cryptographic assumptions and answering an open question presented by King and Saia (DISC’09).

Topology-hiding broadcast ( THB ) enables parties communicating over an incomplete network to broadcast messages while hiding the topology from within a given class of graphs. THB is a central tool underlying general topology-hiding secure computation ( THC ) (Moran et al. TCC’15). Although broadcast is a privacy-free task, it was recently shown that THB for certain graph classes necessitates computational assumptions, even in the semi-honest setting, and even given a single corrupted party. In this work, we investigate the minimal assumptions required for topology-hiding communication: both Broadcast or Anonymous Broadcast (where the broadcaster’s identity is hidden). We develop new techniques that yield a variety of necessary and sufficient conditions for the feasibility of THB / THAB in different cryptographic settings: information theoretic, given existence of key agreement, and given existence of oblivious transfer. Our results show that feasibility can depend on various properties of the graph class, such as connectivity , and highlight the role of different properties of topology when kept hidden, including direction , distance , and/or distance-of-neighbors to the broadcaster. An interesting corollary of our results is a dichotomy for THC with a public number of at least three parties, secure against one corruption: information-theoretic feasibility if all graphs are 2-connected; necessity and sufficiency of key agreement otherwise.

We introduce a notion of round-robin secure sampling that captures several protocols in the literature, such as the "powers-of-tau" setup protocol for pairing-based polynomial commitments and zk-SNARKs, and certain verifiable mixnets. Due to their round-robin structure, protocols of this class inherently require n sequential broadcast rounds, where n is the number of participants. We describe how to compile them generically into protocols that require only O(sqrt(n)) broadcast rounds. Our compiled protocols guarantee output delivery against any dishonest majority. This stands in contrast to prior techniques, which require Omega(n) sequential broadcasts in most cases (and sometimes many more). Our compiled protocols permit a certain amount of adversarial bias in the output, as all sampling protocols with guaranteed output must, due to Cleve's impossibility result (STOC'86). We show that in the context of the aforementioned applications, this bias is harmless.

We present a new multiparty protocol for the distributed generation of biprime RSA moduli, with security against any subset of maliciously colluding parties assuming oblivious transfer and the hardness of factoring. Our protocol is highly modular, and its uppermost layer can be viewed as a template that generalizes the structure of prior works and leads to a simpler security proof. We introduce a combined sampling-and-sieving technique that eliminates both the inherent leakage in the approach of Frederiksen et al. (Crypto’18) and the dependence upon additively homomorphic encryption in the approach of Hazay et al. (JCrypt’19). We combine this technique with an efficient, privacy-free check to detect malicious behavior retroactively when a sampled candidate is not a biprime and thereby overcome covert rejection-sampling attacks and achieve both asymptotic and concrete efficiency improvements over the previous state of the art.

We prove lower bounds on the round complexity of randomized Byzantine agreement (BA) protocols, bounding the halting probability of such protocols after one and two rounds. In particular, we prove that: 1. BA protocols resilient against n /3 [resp., n /4] corruptions terminate (under attack) at the end of the first round with probability at most o (1) [resp., $$1/2+ o(1)$$ 1 / 2 + o ( 1 ) ]. 2. BA protocols resilient against a fraction of corruptions greater than 1/4 terminate at the end of the second round with probability at most $$1-\Theta (1)$$ 1 - Θ ( 1 ) . 3. For a large class of protocols (including all BA protocols used in practice) and under a plausible combinatorial conjecture, BA protocols resilient against a fraction of corruptions greater than 1/3 [resp., 1/4] terminate at the end of the second round with probability at most o (1) [resp., $$1/2 + o(1)$$ 1 / 2 + o ( 1 ) ]. The above bounds hold even when the parties use a trusted setup phase, e.g., a public-key infrastructure (PKI). The third bound essentially matches the recent protocol of Micali (ITCS’17) that tolerates up to n /3 corruptions and terminates at the end of the third round with constant probability.

In the setting of secure multiparty computation (MPC), a set of mutually distrusting parties wish to jointly compute a function, while guaranteeing the privacy of their inputs and the correctness of the output. An MPC protocol is called fully secure if no adversary can prevent the honest parties from obtaining their outputs. A protocol is called fair if an adversary can prematurely abort the computation, however, only before learning any new information. We present efficient transformations from fair computations to fully secure computations, assuming a constant fraction of honest parties (e.g., $$1\%$$ 1 % of the parties are honest). Compared to previous transformations that require linear invocations (in the number of parties) of the fair computation, our transformations require super-logarithmic, and sometimes even super-constant, such invocations. The main idea is to delegate the computation to random committees that invoke the fair computation. Apart from the benefit of uplifting security, the reduction in the number of parties is also useful, since only committee members are required to work, whereas the remaining parties simply “listen” to the computation over a broadcast channel. One application of these transformations is a new $$\delta $$ δ -bias coin-flipping protocol, whose round complexity has a super-logarithmic dependency on the number of parties, improving over the linear-dependency protocol of Beimel, Omri, and Orlov (Crypto 2010). A second application is a new fully secure protocol for computing the Boolean OR function, with a super-constant round complexity, improving over the protocol of Gordon and Katz (TCC 2009) whose round complexity is linear in the number of parties. Finally, we show that our positive results are in a sense optimal, by proving that for some functionalities, a super-constant number of (sequential) invocations of the fair computation is necessary for computing the functionality in a fully secure manner.

An important benchmark for multi-party computation protocols (MPC) is their round complexity . For several important MPC tasks, such as broadcast, (tight) lower bounds on the round complexity are known. However, some of these lower bounds can be circumvented when the termination round of every party is not a priori known, and simultaneous termination is not guaranteed. Protocols with this property are called probabilistic-termination ( PT ) protocols. Running PT protocols in parallel affects the round complexity of the resulting protocol in somewhat unexpected ways. For instance, an execution of m protocols with constant expected round complexity might take $$O(\log m)$$ O ( log m ) rounds to complete. In a seminal work, Ben-Or and El-Yaniv (Distributed Computing ‘03) developed a technique for a parallel execution of arbitrarily many broadcast protocols, while preserving expected round complexity. More recently, Cohen et al.  (CRYPTO ‘16) devised a framework for universal composition of PT protocols, and provided the first composable parallel-broadcast protocol with a simulation-based proof. These constructions crucially rely on the fact that broadcast is “privacy-free,” and do not generalize to arbitrary protocols in a straightforward way. This raises the question of whether it is possible to execute arbitrary PT protocols in parallel, without increasing the round complexity. In this paper we tackle this question and provide both feasibility and infeasibility results. We construct a round-preserving protocol compiler, tolerating any dishonest minority of actively corrupted parties, that compiles arbitrary protocols into a protocol realizing their parallel composition, while having a black-box access to the underlying protocols . Furthermore, we prove that the same cannot be achieved, using known techniques, given only black-box access to the functionalities realized by the protocols, unless merely security against semi-honest corruptions is required, for which case we provide a protocol. To prove our results, we utilize the language and results by Cohen et al. , which we extend to capture parallel composition and reactive functionalities, and to handle the case of an honest majority.

An intensive effort by the cryptographic community to minimize the round complexity of secure multi-party computation (MPC) has recently led to optimal two-round protocols from minimal assumptions. Most of the proposed solutions, however, make use of a broadcast channel in every round, and it is unclear if the broadcast channel can be replaced by standard point-to-point communication in a round-preserving manner, and if so, at what cost on the resulting security. In this work, we provide a complete characterization of the trade-off between number of broadcast rounds and achievable security level for two-round MPC tolerating arbitrarily many active corruptions. Specifically, we consider all possible combinations of broadcast and point-to-point rounds against the three standard levels of security for maliciously se- cure MPC protocols, namely, security with identifiable, unanimous, and selective abort. For each of these notions and each combination of broadcast and point-to-point rounds, we provide either a tight feasibility or an infeasibility result of two-round MPC. Our feasibility results hold assuming two-round OT in the CRS model, whereas our impossibility results hold given any correlated randomness.

We present a new multiparty protocol for the distributed generation of biprime RSA moduli, with security against any subset of maliciously colluding parties assuming oblivious transfer and the hardness of factoring. Our protocol is highly modular, and its uppermost layer can be viewed as a template that generalizes the structure of prior works and leads to a simpler security proof. We introduce a combined sampling-and-sieving technique that eliminates both the inherent leakage in the approach of Frederiksen et al. (Crypto'18), and the dependence upon additively homomorphic encryption in the approach of Hazay et al. (JCrypt'19). We combine this technique with an efficient, privacy-free check to detect malicious behavior retroactively when a sampled candidate is not a biprime, and thereby overcome covert rejection-sampling attacks and achieve both asymptotic and concrete efficiency improvements over the previous state of the art.

Fully secure multiparty computation (MPC) allows a set of parties to compute some function of their inputs, while guaranteeing correctness, privacy, fairness, and output delivery. Understanding the necessary and sufficient assumptions that allow for fully secure MPC is an important goal. Cleve (STOC'86) showed that full security cannot be obtained in general without an honest majority. Conversely, by Rabin and Ben-Or (FOCS'89), assuming a broadcast channel and an honest majority, any function can be computed with full security. Our goal is to characterize the set of functionalities that can be computed with full security, assuming an honest majority, but no broadcast. This question was fully answered by Cohen et al. (TCC'16) -- for the restricted class of \emph{symmetric} functionalities (where all parties receive the same output). Instructively, their results crucially rely on \emph{agreement} and do not carry over to general \emph{asymmetric} functionalities. In this work, we focus on the case of three-party asymmetric functionalities, providing a variety of necessary and sufficient conditions to enable fully secure computation. An interesting use-case of our results is \emph{server-aided} computation, where an untrusted server helps two parties to carry out their computation. We show that without a broadcast assumption, the resource of an external non-colluding server provides no additional power. Namely, a functionality can be computed with the help of the server if and only if it can be computed without it. For fair coin tossing, we further show that the optimal bias for three-party (server-aided) $r$-round protocol remains $\Theta(1/r)$ (as in the two-party setting).

Topology-hiding broadcast (THB) enables parties communicating over an incomplete network to broadcast messages while hiding the topology from within a given class of graphs. THB is a central tool underlying general topology-hiding secure computation (THC) (Moran et al. TCC’15). Although broadcast is a privacy-free task, it was recently shown that THB for certain graph classes necessitates computational assumptions, even in the semi-honest setting, and even given a single corrupted party. In this work we investigate the minimal assumptions required for topology-hiding communication—both Broadcast or Anonymous Broadcast (where the broadcaster’s identity is hidden). We develop new techniques that yield a variety of necessary and sufficient conditions for the feasibility of THB/THAB in different cryptographic settings: information theoretic, given existence of key agreement, and given existence of oblivious transfer. Our results show that feasibility can depend on various properties of the graph class, such as connectivity, and highlight the role of different properties of topology when kept hidden, including direction, distance, and/or distance-of-neighbors to the broadcaster. An interesting corollary of our results is a dichotomy for THC with a public number of at least three parties, secure against one corruption: information-theoretic feasibility if all graphs are 2-connected; necessity and sufficiency of key agreement otherwise.

A central challenge in the study of MPC is to balance between security guarantees, hardness assumptions, and resources required for the protocol. In this work, we study the cost of tolerating adaptive corruptions in MPC protocols under various corruption thresholds. In the strongest setting, we consider adaptive corruptions of an arbitrary number of parties (potentially all) and achieve the following results:A two-round secure function evaluation (SFE) protocol in the CRS model, assuming LWE and indistinguishability obfuscation (iO). The communication, the CRS size, and the online-computation are sublinear in the size of the function. The iO assumption can be replaced by secure erasures. Previous results required either the communication or the CRS size to be polynomial in the function size.Under the same assumptions, we construct a “Bob-optimized” 2PC (where Alice talks first, Bob second, and Alice learns the output). That is, the communication complexity and total computation of Bob are sublinear in the function size and in Alice’s input size. We prove impossibility of “Alice-optimized” protocols.Assuming LWE, we bootstrap adaptively secure NIZK arguments to achieve proof size sublinear in the circuit size of the NP-relation. On a technical level, our results are based on laconic function evaluation (LFE) (Quach, Wee, and Wichs, FOCS’18) and shed light on an interesting duality between LFE and FHE.Next, we analyze adaptive corruptions of all-but-one of the parties and show a two-round SFE protocol in the threshold PKI model (where keys of a threshold FHE scheme are pre-shared among the parties) with communication complexity sublinear in the circuit size, assuming LWE and NIZK. Finally, we consider the honest-majority setting, and show a two-round SFE protocol with guaranteed output delivery under the same constraints.

Topology-hiding computation (THC) is a form of multi-party computation over an incomplete communication graph that maintains the privacy of the underlying graph topology. Existing THC protocols consider an adversary that may corrupt an arbitrary number of parties, and rely on cryptographic assumptions such as DDH.In this paper we address the question of whether information-theoretic THC can be achieved by taking advantage of an honest majority. In contrast to the standard MPC setting, this problem has remained open in the topology-hiding realm, even for simple “privacy-free” functions like broadcast, and even when considering only semi-honest corruptions.We uncover a rich landscape of both positive and negative answers to the above question, showing that what types of graphs are used and how they are selected is an important factor in determining the feasibility of hiding topology information-theoretically. In particular, our results include the following. We show that topology-hiding broadcast (THB) on a line with four nodes, secure against a single semi-honest corruption, implies key agreement. This result extends to broader classes of graphs, e.g., THB on a cycle with two semi-honest corruptions.On the other hand, we provide the first feasibility result for information-theoretic THC: for the class of cycle graphs, with a single semi-honest corruption. Given the strong impossibilities, we put forth a weaker definition of distributional-THC, where the graph is selected from some distribution (as opposed to worst-case). We present a formal separation between the definitions, by showing a distribution for which information theoretic distributional-THC is possible, but even topology-hiding broadcast is not possible information-theoretically with the standard definition.We demonstrate the power of our new definition via a new connection to adaptively secure low-locality MPC, where distributional-THC enables parties to “reuse” a secret low-degree communication graph even in the face of adaptive corruptions.

When analyzing the round complexity of multi-party protocols, one often overlooks the fact that underlying resources, such as a broadcast channel, can by themselves be expensive to implement. For example, it is well known that it is impossible to implement a broadcast channel by a (deterministic) protocol in a sublinear (in the number of corrupted parties) number of rounds. The seminal works of Rabin and Ben-Or from the early 1980s demonstrated that limitations as the above can be overcome by using randomization and allowing parties to terminate at different rounds, igniting the study of protocols over point-to-point channels with probabilistic termination and expected constant round complexity. However, absent a rigorous simulation-based definition, the suggested protocols are proven secure in a property-based manner or via ad hoc simulation-based frameworks, therefore guaranteeing limited, if any, composability. In this work, we put forth the first simulation-based treatment of multi-party cryptographic protocols with probabilistic termination. We define secure multi-party computation (MPC) with probabilistic termination in the UC framework and prove a universal composition theorem for probabilistic termination protocols. Our theorem allows to compile a protocol using deterministic termination hybrids into a protocol that uses expected constant round protocols for emulating these hybrids, preserving the expected round complexity of the calling protocol. We showcase our definitions and compiler by providing the first composable protocols (with simulation-based security proofs) for the following primitives, relying on point-to-point channels: (1) expected constant round perfect Byzantine agreement, (2) expected constant round perfect parallel broadcast, and (3) perfectly secure MPC with round complexity independent of the number of parties.

Secure multiparty computation (MPC) on incomplete communication networks has been studied within two primary models: (1) Where a partial network is fixed a priori, and thus corruptions can occur dependent on its structure, and (2) Where edges in the communication graph are determined dynamically as part of the protocol. Whereas a rich literature has succeeded in mapping out the feasibility and limitations of graph structures supporting secure computation in the fixed-graph model (including strong classical lower bounds), these bounds do not apply in the latter dynamic-graph setting, which has recently seen exciting new results, but remains relatively unexplored.In this work, we initiate a similar foundational study of MPC within the dynamic-graph model. As a first step, we investigate the property of graph expansion. All existing protocols (implicitly or explicitly) yield communication graphs which are expanders, but it is not clear whether this is inherent. Our results consist of two types:Upper bounds: We demonstrate secure protocols whose induced communication graphs are not expanders, within a wide range of settings (computational, information theoretic, with low locality, and adaptive security), each assuming some form of input-independent setup.Lower bounds: In the setting without setup and adaptive corruptions, we demonstrate that for certain functionalities, no protocol can maintain a non-expanding communication graph against all adversarial strategies. Our lower bound relies only on protocol correctness (not privacy), and requires a surprisingly delicate argument.