An Almost-Optimally Fair Three-Party Coin-Flipping Protocol
This addresses a gap in secure multiparty computation for scenarios where two-thirds or more parties can be corrupted, though it is incremental as it builds on prior work without fully closing the theoretical gap.
The paper tackles the problem of designing a fair three-party coin-flipping protocol against dishonest majority, achieving a bias of O(log^3 m)/m, which improves upon the previous best of Θ(ℓ/√m) for this case.
In a multiparty fair coin-flipping protocol, the parties output a common (close to) unbiased bit, even when some corrupted parties try to bias the output. Cleve [STOC 1986] has shown that in the case of dishonest majority (i.e., at least half of the parties can be corrupted), in any $m$-round coin-flipping protocol the corrupted parties can bias the honest parties' common output bit by $Ω(\frac1{m})$. For more than two decades the best known coin-flipping protocols against dishonest majority had bias $Θ(\frac{\ell}{\sqrt{m}})$, where $\ell$ is the number of corrupted parties. This was changed by a recent breakthrough result of Moran et al. [TCC 2009], who constructed an $m$-round, two-party coin-flipping protocol with optimal bias $Θ(\frac1{m})$. In a subsequent work, Beimel et al. [Crypto 2010] extended this result to the multiparty case in which less than $\frac23$ of the parties can be corrupted. Still for the case of $\frac23$ (or more) corrupted parties, the best known protocol had bias $Θ(\frac{\ell}{\sqrt{m}})$. In particular, this was the state of affairs for the natural three-party case. We make a step towards eliminating the above gap, presenting an $m$-round, three-party coin-flipping protocol, with bias $\frac{O(\log^3 m)}m$. Our approach (which we also apply for the two-party case) does not follow the "threshold round" paradigm used in the work of Moran et al. and Beimel et al., but rather is a variation of the majority protocol of Cleve, used to obtain the aforementioned $Θ(\frac{\ell}{\sqrt{m}})$-bias protocol.