Proactive Secure Multiparty Computation with a Dishonest Majority

Secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols enable n distrusting parties to perform computations on their private inputs while guaranteeing confidentiality of inputs (and outputs, if desired) and correctness of the computation, as long as no adversary corrupts more than a threshold t of the n parties. Existing MPC protocols assure perfect security for \(t\le \lceil n/2\rceil -1\) active corruptions with termination (i.e., robustness), or up to \(t=n-1\) under cryptographic assumptions (with detection of misbehaving parties). However, when computations involve secrets that have to remain confidential for a long time such as cryptographic keys, or when dealing with strong and persistent adversaries, such security guarantees are not enough. In these situations, all parties may be corrupted over the lifetime of the secrets used in the computation, and the threshold t may be violated over time (even as portions of the network are being repaired or cleaned up). Proactive MPC (PMPC) addresses this stronger threat model: it guarantees correctness and input privacy in the presence of a mobile adversary that controls a changing set of parties over the course of a protocol, and could corrupt all parties over the lifetime of the computation, as long as no more than t are corrupted in each time window (called a refresh period). The threshold t in PMPC represents a tradeoff between the adversary’s penetration rate and the cleaning speed of the defense tools (or rebooting of nodes from a clean image), rather than being an absolute bound on corruptions. Prior PMPC protocols only guarantee correctness and confidentiality in the presence of an honest majority of parties, an adversary that corrupts even a single additional party beyond the \(n/2-1\) threshold, even if only passively and temporarily, can learn all the inputs and outputs; and if the corruption is active rather than passive, then the adversary can even compromise the correctness of the computation.