(Unconditional) Secure Multiparty Computation with Man-in-the-middle Attacks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new intermediate model for unconditional secure multiparty computation where some communication channels can be passively or actively corrupted, relaxing the assumption of fully authenticated channels.

Contribution

It defines security for this intermediate model and adapts existing protocols to achieve these security guarantees, demonstrating the model's feasibility and tightness of results.

Findings

Security definitions for the new model are established.

Protocols are adapted to handle corrupted channels.

Results demonstrate the model's practicality and theoretical tightness.

Abstract

In secure multi-party computation $n$ parties jointly evaluate an $n$-variate function $f$ in the presence of an adversary which can corrupt up till $t$ parties. Almost all the works that have appeared in the literature so far assume the presence of authenticated channels between the parties. This assumption is far from realistic. Two directions of research have been borne from relaxing this (strong) assumption: (a) The adversary is virtually omnipotent and can control all the communication channels in the network, (b) Only a partially connected topology of authenticated channels is guaranteed and adversary controls a subset of the communication channels in the network. This work introduces a new setting for (unconditional) secure multiparty computation problem which is an interesting intermediate model with respect to the above well studied models from the literature (by sharing a salient feature from both the above models). We consider the problem of (unconditional) secure multi-party computation when 'some' of the communication channels connecting the parties can be corrupted passively as well as actively. For this setting, some honest parties may be connected to several other honest parties via corrupted channels and may not be able to authentically communicate with them. Such parties may not be assured the canonical guarantees of correctness or privacy. We present refined definitions of security for this new intermediate model of unconditional multiparty computation. We show how to adapt protocols for (Unconditional) secure multiparty computation to realize the definitions and also argue the tightness of the results achieved by us.