Choose wisely: A comparison of secure two-party computation frameworks

Abstract

Secure Two-Party Computation (STC), despite being a powerful tool for privacy engineers, is rarely used practically due to two reasons: i) STCs incur significant overheads and ii) developing efficient STCs requires expert knowledge. Recent works propose a variety of frameworks that address these problems. However, the varying assumptions, scenarios, and benchmarks in these works render results incomparable. It is thus hard, if not impossible, for an inexperienced developer of STCs to choose the best framework for her task. In this paper, we present a thorough quantitative performance analysis of recent STC frameworks. Our results reveal significant performance differences and we identify potential for optimizations as well as new research directions for STC. Complemented by a qualitative discussion of the frameworks' usability, our results provide privacy engineers with a dependable information basis to take the decision for the right STC framework fitting their application.