Complexity and security of distributed protocols

This thesis addresses the topic of secure distributed computation, a general and powerful tool for balancing cooperation and mistrust among independent agents. We study many related models, which differ as to the allowable communication among agents, the ways in which agents may misbehave, and the complexity (cryptographic) assumptions that are made. We present new protocols, both for general secure computation (i.e., of any function over a finite domain) and for specific tasks (e.g., electronic money). We investigate fundamental relationships among security needs and various resource requirements, with an emphasis on communication complexity. A number of mathematical methods are employed for our investigations, including algebraic, graph-theoretic, and cryptographic techniques.