1982 749 AC Yao, Protocols for secure computations.pdf

Protocols for Secure Computations (extended abstract) Andrew C. Yao University of California Berkeley, California 94720 1 Introduction Two millionaires wish to know who is richer; however, they do not want to find out inadvertently any additional information about each other’s wealth. How can they carry out such a conversation? This is a special case of the following general prob- lem. Suppose m people wish to compute the value of a function f(x1, x2, x3, . . . , xm), which is an integer-valued function of m integer variables xi of bounded range. As- sume initially person Pi knows the value of xi and no other x’s. Is it possible for them to compute the value of f , by communicating among themselves, without unduly giving away any information about the values of their own variables? The millionaires’ problem corresponds to the case when m = 2 and f(x1, x2) = 1 if x1 x2, and 0 otherwise. In this paper, we will give precise formu- lation of this general problem and describe three ways of solving it by use of one-way functions (i.e., functions which are easy to evaluate but hard to invert). These results have applications to secret voting, private query- ing of database, oblivious negotiation, playing mental poker, etc. We will also discuss the complexity question “How many bits need to be exchanged for the computa- tion”, and describe methods to prevent participants from cheating. Finally, we study the question “What cannot be accomplished with one-way functions”. Before describing these results, we would like to put this work in perspective by first considering a unified view of secure computation in the next section. 2 A Unified View of Secure Computation Since one-way functions were first proposed in 1976 (Diffie and Hellman [1]), they have been used in two kinds of applications. The first kind is concerned with the encryption and transmission of messages to make them unreadable and unalterable for eavesdroppers and saboteurs [1, 2, 3, 4]. The second kind of applic