Lessons learned with PCF: scaling secure computation

Abstract

The Portable Circuit Format (PCF) system presented by Kreuter et al.[kmsb13] addressed an important bottleneck in the tools developed by the research community for secure computation. The PCF system is based on the idea that circuits can be represented as programs that emit gates on certain state transitions. By dealing with programs rather than circuits, functions have much smaller representations, the PCF compiler is able to apply automatic optimizations to much larger functions, and the runtime system requires far less memory. We present our future plans for the PCF system and our current work-in-progress.