ReplayMPC: A Fast Failure Recovery Protocol for Secure Multiparty Computation Applications using Blockchain

Abstract

Although recent performance improvements to Secure Multiparty Computation (SMPC) made it a practical solution for complex applications such as privacy-preserving machine learning (ML), other characteristics such as robustness are also critical for its practical viability. For instance, since ML training under SMPC may take longer times (e.g., hours or days in many cases), any interruption of the computation will require restarting the process, which results in more delays and waste of computing resources. While one can maintain exchanged SMPC messages in a separate database, their integrity and authenticity should be guaranteed to be able to re-use them later. Therefore, in this paper, we propose ReplayMPC, an efficient failure recovery mechanism for SMPC based on blockchain technology that enables resuming and re-synchronizing SMPC parties after any type of communication or system failures. Our approach allows SMPC parties to save computation state snapshots they use as restoration points during the recovery and then reproduce the last computation rounds by retrieving information from immutable messages stored on a blockchain. Our experiment results on Algorand blockchain show that recovery is much faster than starting the whole process from scratch, saving time, computation, and networking resources.