Introduction to Silent Secure Computation

Secure computation allows any number of mutually distrustful parties to jointly run anarbitrary computation on their combined inputs without compromising their privacy. Securecomputation offers a theoretical solution to a vast array of problems where one wishes tosimultaneously maintain a fine-grained control over the users’ privacy and have flexibilityin how their data is used in a protocol. Over the past decade, secure computation haslargely emerged from the depth of theoretical research to enter the realm of practically-usabletechnologies, and secure protocols are now routinely implemented and deployed. This isthe result of a widespread and ongoing research effort from the cryptography community,which has produced a diverse ecosystem of protocols and paradigms optimized for a varietyof concrete applications. This book covers one such recent paradigm, the area of silentsecure computation, which strikes a careful balance between communication and computationoverheads. This paradigm has recently emerged as a promising path towards fast securecomputation in bandwidth-restricted settings, and has had a significant influence on thelandscape of practical secure computation. The goal of the book is to provide an accessibleintroduction to silent secure computation. It is aimed at Ph.D. students and researchersin cryptography and has a strong focus on explaining the intuitions and giving the readera sense of scale, in the hope of conveying insights about the practicality of silent securecomputation in various contexts and to give a clear overview of some of the core challengesin the field.