Practical Secure Computation for Internet Infrastructure

Kris Shrishak Sridaran
2021
The Internet has been a boon in the lives of many in the world, opening up opportunities that may have been unknown or inaccessible to them. The growth in the availability of computational resources has made it possible to collect, compile, store, process and interpret data at a scale that was not imaginable in the past. The combination of the Internet and computing resources has resulted in a world that creates more data every year than ever in the past, where data can be harvested for the
more » ... fit of society. However, when the surface seems too shiny, the dangers lurk nearby. One such danger is privacy violation that can take several forms including nosy corporate employees, hacked databases as well as government coercion of centralised authorities that manage the Internet infrastructure. Secure multi-party computation (MPC) is a cryptographic tool for privacy-preserving computation. MPC allows multiple entities to perform joint computation over their private inputs, revealing only the output. Although the theoretical foundations for the two-party variant, secure two-party computation (2PC), were introduced in the 1980s, MPC has not yet seen widespread deployment in spite of its benefits. Not only is MPC useful when data needs to be processed, but it is also useful when cryptographic data such as signing keys are to be kept securely. In this thesis, we make MPC practical to secure Internet infrastructure. While MPC has been applied to many applications, it has not yet been used to secure Internet infrastructure. In the process of making MPC practical, we address several challenges in this thesis. First, we observe that the practical performance of 2PC can be improved by the use of different transport layer protocols. On the basis of this observation, we develop a framework that automates the integration of transport layer protocols into 2PC implementations. We show through extensive evaluations that the efficiency gained by using better transport layer protocols is sometimes much greater than that can be achieve [...]
doi:10.26083/tuprints-00018504 fatcat:or564dd4ffhb7ndhuk5w6xpetm