How MPC Frameworks Use Threshold Cryptography

Abstract: Secure multi-party computation allows a group of mutually distrustful parties to compute a joint function on their inputs without revealing any information beyond the result of the computation. This type of computation is extremely powerful and has wide-ranging applications in academia, industry, and government. In recent years, general-purpose compilers for executing MPC on arbitrary functions have rapidly advanced the state of the art. However, the field is changing so rapidly that it is difficult even for experts to keep track of the varied capabilities of modern frameworks. In this talk, I will describe our survey of general-purpose compilers for secure multi-party computation. We evaluated the tools on a range of criteria, including language expressibility, capabilities of the cryptographic back-end, and accessibility to developers. I will discuss the limitations in documentation and software engineering we identified and discuss how the findings from this work can be used when evaluating multi-party threshold schemes.