Welcome to the Blog of the MPC Lounge!
The MPC Lounge is a project of an international group of researchers with an interest in applications of MPC.
The aim of the MPC lounge is to provide information about the practical and applied aspects of secure two-party and multiparty computation, with a focus on general protocols. This includes results about efficient protocols, implementations, optimizations and so on.
The MPC lounge consists of this blog, with posts on the topic of efficient secure computation and implementations, and a twitter feed with short announcements and a Wiki with general and specific information on the field. At this stage only authorized users can edit the Wiki. If you are an expert in secure computation techniques and application, write to us (mpclounge at cs dot au dot dk) and we will create an account for you.
We hope that this site will be helpful to the community interested in researching this area, and to the community interested in using secure computation within their applications.
Secure Multiparty Computation
Protocols for secure two-party and multiparty computation enable a set of two or more parties to compute a joint function of their inputs without revealing anything but the output of the function. Secure protocols guarantee a number of properties including privacy (that nothing but the output is revealed), correctness (that the correct result is obtained) and independence of inputs (ensuring that parties must choose their inputs independently of the others). Secure computation has many applications, including electronic voting and auctions, privacy-preserving data mining, secure cloud computing and more.
The Theory and Practice of Secure Computation
Research on secure computation began in the mid 1980s, and for the most part was theoretical in nature. This research direction yielded impressive results demonstrating that essentially any function can be securely computed, even in the presence of powerful adversaries. However, the protocols that were constructed for proving these powerful feasibility results were not efficient enough to be used in practice. Indeed, until recently, secure computation was considered to be of purely theoretical interest by most. The situation has changed radically in the past decade, and specifically in the past 5 years. There are now many protocols for general secure computation (meaning that they can be used for computing any functionality) that are efficient enough to be used for a number of different real-world applications. In addition, significant progress has been made on secure computation implementations, and we now know that good engineering and implementation optimizations can make a huge difference. In summary, secure computation now has the potential to become a powerful tool in practice, and the MPC lounge has been set up in order to promote this goal.
The MPC Lounge 