CheapSMC: A Framework to Minimize SMC Cost in Cloud
This work addresses cost reduction for cloud-based SMC deployments, representing an incremental improvement by optimizing existing mixed-protocol tools.
The paper tackles the problem of minimizing the cost of secure multi-party computation (SMC) in cloud deployments by proposing CheapSMC, a generic optimization framework that finds the cheapest mixed-protocol SMC execution, with empirical results showing significant cost savings.
Secure multi-party computation (SMC) techniques are increasingly becoming more efficient and practical thanks to many recent novel improvements. The recent work have shown that different protocols that are implemented using different sharing mechanisms (e.g., boolean, arithmetic sharings, etc.) may have different computational and communication costs. Although there are some works that automatically mix protocols of different sharing schemes to fasten execution, none of them provide a generic optimization framework to find the cheapest mixed-protocol SMC execution for cloud deployment. In this work, we propose a generic SMC optimization framework CheapSMC that can use any mixed-protocol SMC circuit evaluation tool as a black-box to find the cheapest SMC cloud deployment option. To find the cheapest SMC protocol, CheapSMC runs one time benchmarks for the target cloud service and gathers performance statistics for basic circuit components. Using these performance statistics, optimization layer of CheapSMC runs multiple heuristics to find the cheapest mix-protocol circuit evaluation. Later on, the optimized circuit is passed to a mix-protocol SMC tool for actual executable generation. Our empirical results gathered by running different cases studies show that significant cost savings could be achieved using our optimization framework.