Arpita Patra

Nishat Koti, Shravani Patil, Arpita Patra et al.

The growing volumes of data being collected and its analysis to provide better services are creating worries about digital privacy. To address privacy concerns and give practical solutions, the literature has relied on secure multiparty computation. However, recent research has mostly focused on the small-party honest-majority setting of up to four parties, noting efficiency concerns. In this work, we extend the strategies to support a larger number of participants in an honest-majority setting with efficiency at the center stage. Cast in the preprocessing paradigm, our semi-honest protocol improves the online complexity of the decade-old state-of-the-art protocol of Damgård and Nielson (CRYPTO'07). In addition to having an improved online communication cost, we can shut down almost half of the parties in the online phase, thereby saving up to 50% in the system's operational costs. Our maliciously secure protocol also enjoys similar benefits and requires only half of the parties, except for one-time verification, towards the end. To showcase the practicality of the designed protocols, we benchmark popular applications such as deep neural networks, graph neural networks, genome sequence matching, and biometric matching using prototype implementations. Our improved protocols aid in bringing up to 60-80% savings in monetary cost over prior work.

Anirudh Chandramouli, Ashish Choudhury, Arpita Patra

Verifiable Secret-Sharing (VSS) is a fundamental primitive in secure distributed computing. It is used as a building block in several distributed computing tasks, such as Byzantine agreement and secure multi-party computation. In this article, we consider VSS schemes with perfect security, tolerating computationally unbounded adversaries. We comprehensively survey the existing perfectly-secure VSS schemes in three different communication settings, namely synchronous, asynchronous and hybrid setting and provide full details of the existing schemes in these settings. The aim of this survey is to provide a clear knowledge and foundation to researchers who are interested in knowing and extending the state-of-the-art perfectly-secure VSS schemes.

Nishat Koti, Arpita Patra, Rahul Rachuri et al.

Mixing arithmetic and boolean circuits to perform privacy-preserving machine learning has become increasingly popular. Towards this, we propose a framework for the case of four parties with at most one active corruption called Tetrad. Tetrad works over rings and supports two levels of security, fairness and robustness. The fair multiplication protocol costs 5 ring elements, improving over the state-of-the-art Trident (Chaudhari et al. NDSS'20). A key feature of Tetrad is that robustness comes for free over fair protocols. Other highlights across the two variants include (a) probabilistic truncation without overhead, (b) multi-input multiplication protocols, and (c) conversion protocols to switch between the computational domains, along with a tailor-made garbled circuit approach. Benchmarking of Tetrad for both training and inference is conducted over deep neural networks such as LeNet and VGG16. We found that Tetrad is up to 4 times faster in ML training and up to 5 times faster in ML inference. Tetrad is also lightweight in terms of deployment cost, costing up to 6 times less than Trident.

Nishat Koti, Mahak Pancholi, Arpita Patra et al.

Performing machine learning (ML) computation on private data while maintaining data privacy, aka Privacy-preserving Machine Learning~(PPML), is an emergent field of research. Recently, PPML has seen a visible shift towards the adoption of the Secure Outsourced Computation~(SOC) paradigm due to the heavy computation that it entails. In the SOC paradigm, computation is outsourced to a set of powerful and specially equipped servers that provide service on a pay-per-use basis. In this work, we propose SWIFT, a robust PPML framework for a range of ML algorithms in SOC setting, that guarantees output delivery to the users irrespective of any adversarial behaviour. Robustness, a highly desirable feature, evokes user participation without the fear of denial of service. At the heart of our framework lies a highly-efficient, maliciously-secure, three-party computation (3PC) over rings that provides guaranteed output delivery (GOD) in the honest-majority setting. To the best of our knowledge, SWIFT is the first robust and efficient PPML framework in the 3PC setting. SWIFT is as fast as (and is strictly better in some cases than) the best-known 3PC framework BLAZE (Patra et al. NDSS'20), which only achieves fairness. We extend our 3PC framework for four parties (4PC). In this regime, SWIFT is as fast as the best known fair 4PC framework Trident (Chaudhari et al. NDSS'20) and twice faster than the best-known robust 4PC framework FLASH (Byali et al. PETS'20). We demonstrate our framework's practical relevance by benchmarking popular ML algorithms such as Logistic Regression and deep Neural Networks such as VGG16 and LeNet, both over a 64-bit ring in a WAN setting. For deep NN, our results testify to our claims that we provide improved security guarantee while incurring no additional overhead for 3PC and obtaining 2x improvement for 4PC.

Arpita Patra, Ajith Suresh

Machine learning tools have illustrated their potential in many significant sectors such as healthcare and finance, to aide in deriving useful inferences. The sensitive and confidential nature of the data, in such sectors, raise natural concerns for the privacy of data. This motivated the area of Privacy-preserving Machine Learning (PPML) where privacy of the data is guaranteed. Typically, ML techniques require large computing power, which leads clients with limited infrastructure to rely on the method of Secure Outsourced Computation (SOC). In SOC setting, the computation is outsourced to a set of specialized and powerful cloud servers and the service is availed on a pay-per-use basis. In this work, we explore PPML techniques in the SOC setting for widely used ML algorithms-- Linear Regression, Logistic Regression, and Neural Networks. We propose BLAZE, a blazing fast PPML framework in the three server setting tolerating one malicious corruption over a ring (\Z{\ell}). BLAZE achieves the stronger security guarantee of fairness (all honest servers get the output whenever the corrupt server obtains the same). Leveraging an input-independent preprocessing phase, BLAZE has a fast input-dependent online phase relying on efficient PPML primitives such as: (i) A dot product protocol for which the communication in the online phase is independent of the vector size, the first of its kind in the three server setting; (ii) A method for truncation that shuns evaluating expensive circuit for Ripple Carry Adders (RCA) and achieves a constant round complexity. This improves over the truncation method of ABY3 (Mohassel et al., CCS 2018) that uses RCA and consumes a round complexity that is of the order of the depth of RCA. An extensive benchmarking of BLAZE for the aforementioned ML algorithms over a 64-bit ring in both WAN and LAN settings shows massive improvements over ABY3.

Harsh Chaudhari, Ashish Choudhury, Arpita Patra et al.

The concrete efficiency of secure computation has been the focus of many recent works. In this work, we present concretely-efficient protocols for secure $3$-party computation (3PC) over a ring of integers modulo $2^{\ell}$ tolerating one corruption, both with semi-honest and malicious security. Owing to the fact that computation over ring emulates computation over the real-world system architectures, secure computation over ring has gained momentum of late. Cast in the offline-online paradigm, our constructions present the most efficient online phase in concrete terms. In the semi-honest setting, our protocol requires communication of $2$ ring elements per multiplication gate during the {\it online} phase, attaining a per-party cost of {\em less than one element}. This is achieved for the first time in the regime of 3PC. In the {\it malicious} setting, our protocol requires communication of $4$ elements per multiplication gate during the online phase, beating the state-of-the-art protocol by $5$ elements. Realized with both the security notions of selective abort and fairness, the malicious protocol with fairness involves slightly more communication than its counterpart with abort security for the output gates {\em alone}. We apply our techniques from $3$PC in the regime of secure server-aided machine-learning (ML) inference for a range of prediction functions-- linear regression, linear SVM regression, logistic regression, and linear SVM classification. Our setting considers a model-owner with trained model parameters and a client with a query, with the latter willing to learn the prediction of her query based on the model parameters of the former. The inputs and computation are outsourced to a set of three non-colluding servers. Our constructions catering to both semi-honest and the malicious world, invariably perform better than the existing constructions.

Arpita Patra, Pratik Sarkar, Ajith Suresh

Oblivious Transfer (OT) is one of the most fundamental cryptographic primitives with wide-spread application in general secure multi-party computation (MPC) as well as in a number of tailored and special-purpose problems of interest such as private set intersection (PSI), private information retrieval (PIR), contract signing to name a few. Often the instantiations of OT require prohibitive communication and computation complexity. OT extension protocols are introduced to compute a very large number of OTs referred to as extended OTs at the cost of a small number of OTs referred to as seed OTs. We present a fast OT extension protocol for small secrets in the active setting. Our protocol when used to produce 1-out-of-n OTs outperforms all the known actively secure OT extensions. Our protocol is built on the semi-honest secure extension protocol of Kolesnikov and Kumaresan of CRYPTO'13 (referred to as KK13 protocol henceforth) which is the best known OT extension for short secrets.