Jack Doerner — An Introduction to Practical MPC

The field of Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) has seen an explosion of research over the past few years: though once a mostly theoretical idea, it has rapidly become a powerful, practical tool capable of efficiently solving real-world problems. However, this has come at the cost of dramatically increased complexity, expressed through a diversity of foundational techniques, high-level systems, and implementation folk knowledge. This talk will address the practical aspects of multiparty computation, discussing a number of low level paradigms and their accompanying implementations, along with the various efficiency, functionality, and usability compromises that they offer. In addition, it will serve as an introduction to a set of tools and techniques that are commonly used in conjunction with generic MPC schemes, such as Oblivious RAM, permutation networks, and custom protocols. It is hoped that this will serve as a jumping-off-point, from which new problems can be addressed.