Social rational secure multi‐party computation

Rational party is a new kind of parties who behave neither like honest parties nor like malicious adversaries. The crux point of rational party is the definition of the utility function, as rational parties only care about how to maximize their utility. In other words, rational parties choose the strategies, which can bring them the highest utilities. In rational secure two‐party computation protocol, the main task is how to boost mutual cooperation to complete the protocol. Social rational secure multi‐party computation (SRSMPC) means that in a social network, some distributed and rational parties with reputation properties want to jointly compute a functionality. The seemingly simple task becomes tough under three conditions. The first condition is that the network composed by parties may not be complete. That is, two parties may not be neighbors and they are connected through other parties. The second is that the network may be not secure. That is, messages may be tempered by malicious parties. The third condition is that parties may run the protocol under incomplete information scenario. That is, parties may have types and each type has a corresponding utility function. Under the first and second conditions, parties need to consider how to securely transmit messages between two parties who are not neighbors. Under the third condition, we propose the Tit‐for‐Tat strategy and prove that mutual cooperation is a sequential equilibrium between two parties. In this paper, we construct an SRSMPC protocol by using mechanism design under incomplete information to facilitate the implementation of the SRSMPC protocol within constant rounds. Meanwhile, newcomers are allowed to participate in the protocol. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first social rational secure computation protocol for multi‐party under an incomplete information scenario and an incomplete network. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.