Review of efficient secure two-party protocols: techniques and constructions by Carmit Hazay and Yehuda Lindell

Textbooks and monographs (where a monograph is distinguished from a textbook by a monograph’s focus on a relatively specialized topic) can play a significant role in defining a field. Books that are widely used in graduate courses can shape students’ (and professors’!) perspectives on the subject; a text that becomes a ‘bible’ for graduate students can influence the direction a field moves. Textbooks and monographs can even have influence outside their own community, if they provide a treatment that is accessible to a broad audience from a wide range of backgrounds. This potential impact of monographs (and, to a lesser extent, textbooks) appears under-appreciated in our community. More to the point, there seem to be fewer texts available than there “should” be — observe how often graduate computer science courses are taught without any assigned textbook, or how difficult it can be to generate a reading list for a beginning graduate student — and certainly there are fewer TCSfocused monographs than there are in disciplines such as chemistry or mathematics, to take two examples. While there may be legitimate reasons that partially account for this, the result is to the overall detriment of our field. This situation has, thankfully, begun to change. Several excellent textbooks have become available in the past few years, and we have also witnessed the publication of many monographs that have become quite popular within their own niche areas. The book under review, constituting a detailed treatment of efficient secure two-party computation suitable for a graduate seminar or self-study, continues this positive trend. (Full disclosure: I have co-authored papers with both authors, and have written a textbook with one of them.)