Insured MPC: Efficient Secure Computation with Financial Penalties

Abstract

Fairness in Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) is known to be impossible to achieve in the presence of a dishonest majority. Previous works have proposed combining MPC protocols with cryptocurrencies in order to financially punish aborting adversaries, providing an incentive for parties to honestly follow the protocol. The focus of existing work is on proving that this approach is possible and unfortunately they present monolithic and mostly inefficient constructions. In this work, we put forth the first UC secure modular construction of “Insured MPC”, where either the output of the private computation (which describes how to distribute funds) is fairly delivered or a proof that a set of parties has misbehaved is produced, allowing for financial punishments. Moreover, both the output and the proof of cheating are publicly verifiable, allowing third parties to independently validate an execution. We present an efficient compiler that implements Insured MPC from an MPC protocol with certain properties, a standard (non-private) Smart Contract and a publicly verifiable homomorphic commitment scheme. As an intermediate step, we propose the first construction of a publicly verifiable homomorphic commitment scheme with composability guarantees.