A Performance and Resource Consumption Assessment of Secure Multiparty Computation

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive performance and resource consumption analysis of secure multiparty computation protocols based on secret sharing, evaluating their scalability and practicality in different network environments.

Contribution

It is the first detailed study analyzing the scalability and resource usage of secret sharing-based SMC protocols across various environmental parameters.

Findings

SMC protocols are practical in intranet environments.

Performance degrades with increased network latency and packet loss.

Resource consumption remains manageable under certain conditions.

Abstract

In recent years, secure multiparty computation (SMC) advanced from a theoretical technique to a practically applicable technology. Several frameworks were proposed of which some are still actively developed. We perform a first comprehensive study of performance characteristics of SMC protocols using a promising implementation based on secret sharing, a common and state-of-the-art foundation. Therefor, we analyze its scalability with respect to environmental parameters as the number of peers, network properties -- namely transmission rate, packet loss, network latency -- and parallelization of computations as parameters and execution time, CPU cycles, memory consumption and amount of transmitted data as variables. Our insights on the resource consumption show that such a solution is practically applicable in intranet environments and -- with limitations -- in Internet settings.