Towards Secure Evaluation of Online Functionalities

Abstract

To date, ideal functionalities securely realized with secure multi-party computation (SMPC) mainly considers functions of the private input of a fixed number of a priori known parties. In this paper, we generalize these definitions such that protocols implementing online algorithms in a distributed fashion can be proven to be privacy-preserving. Online algorithms compute online functionalities that allow parties to join and leave over time, to provide multiple inputs and to obtain multiple outputs. In particular, the set of parties participating changes over time, i. e., at different points in time different sets of parties evaluate a function over their private inputs. To this end, we propose the notion of an online trusted third party that allows to prove the security of SMPC protocols implementing online functionalities or online algorithms, respectively. We show that any online functionality can be implemented perfectly secure in the presence of a semi-honest adversary, if strictly less than 1/2 of the parties participating are corrupted. We show that the same result holds in the presence of a malicious adversary if it corrupts strictly less than 1/3 of the parties and always allows the corrupted parties to arrive.