Breaking Free: Efficient Multi-Party Private Set Union Without Non-Collusion Assumptions

TL;DR

This paper introduces two novel multi-party private set union protocols: one achieving semi-honest security with oblivious transfer and symmetric-key techniques, and another attaining both linear computation and communication complexity, significantly improving efficiency.

Contribution

It presents the first semi-honest secure MPSU protocol using oblivious transfer and symmetric-key methods, and the first to achieve both linear computation and communication complexity.

Findings

The semi-honest MPSU protocol is 3.9-10.0 times faster in LAN settings.

The linear-complexity MPSU protocol reduces communication costs by up to 36.5 times.

Both protocols outperform previous work in efficiency and security assumptions.

Abstract

Multi-party private set union (MPSU) protocol enables $m$ $(m > 2)$ parties, each holding a set, to collectively compute the union of their sets without revealing any additional information to other parties. There are two main categories of multi-party private set union (MPSU) protocols: The first category builds on public-key techniques, where existing works require a super-linear number of public-key operations, resulting in their poor practical efficiency. The second category builds on oblivious transfer and symmetric-key techniques. The only work in this category, proposed by Liu and Gao (ASIACRYPT 2023), features the best concrete performance among all existing protocols, but still has super-linear computation and communication. Moreover, it does not achieve the standard semi-honest security, as it inherently relies on a non-collusion assumption, which is unlikely to hold in practice. There remains two significant open problems so far: no MPSU protocol achieves semi-honest security based on oblivious transfer and symmetric-key techniques, and no MPSU protocol achieves both linear computation and linear communication complexity. In this work, we resolve both of them. - We propose the first MPSU protocol based on oblivious transfer and symmetric-key techniques in the standard semi-honest model. This protocol is $3.9-10.0 \times$ faster than Liu and Gao in the LAN setting. Concretely, our protocol requires only $4.4$ seconds in online phase for 3 parties with sets of $2^{20}$ items each. - We propose the first MPSU protocol achieving both linear computation and linear communication complexity, based on public-key operations. This protocol has the lowest overall communication costs and shows a factor of $3.0-36.5\times$ improvement in terms of overall communication compared to Liu and Gao.