SCAPI: The Secure Computation Application Programming Interface

Secure two-party and multiparty computation has long stood at the center of the foundations of theoretical cryptography. Recently, however, interest has grown regarding the efficiency of such protocols and their application in practice. As a result, there has been significant progress on this problem and it is possible to actually carry out secure computation for non-trivial tasks on reasonably large inputs. Part of this research goal of making secure computation practical has also involved implementations. Such implementations are of importance for two reasons: first, they demonstrate the real efficiency of known and new protocols; second, they deepen our understanding regarding where the bottlenecks in efficiency lie. However, it is very hard to compare between implementations by different research groups since they are carried out on different platforms and using different infrastructures. In addition, most implementations have been carried out without the goal of code reuse, and so are not helpful to other researchers. The difficulty of beginning implementation projects is further compounded by the fact that existing cryptographic libraries (like openSSL, Bouncy Castle, and others) are tailored for tasks like encryption, authentication and key-exchange, and not for secure computation. We have developed SCAPI in order to address these problems. SCAPI is an open-source general library tailored for secure computation implementations. Our aim in developing SCAPI has been to provide a flexible and efficient infrastructure for secure computation implementations, that is both easy to use and robust. Great care has been taken in the design of the library, in writing clean code, and in documentation. We hope that this library will be useful to the community interested in implementations of secure protocols, and will help to promote the goal of making secure computation practical. ∗The SCAPI library was developed through the support of the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n. 239868.