Parallel Reducibility for Information-Theoretically Secure Computation

Secure Function Evaluation (SFE) protocols are very hard to design, and reducibility has been recognized as a highly desirable property of SFE protocols. Informally speaking, reducibility (sometimes called modular composition) is the automatic ability to break up the design of complex SFE protocols into several simpler, individually secure components. Despite much effort, only the most basic type of reducibility, sequential reducibility (where only a single sub-protocol can be run at a time), has been considered and proven to hold for a specific class of SFE protocols. Unfortunately, sequential reducibility does not allow one to save on the number of rounds (often the most expensive resource in a distributed setting), and achieving more general notions is not easy (indeed, certain SFE notions provably enjoy sequential reducibility, but fail to enjoy more general ones). In this paper, for information-theoretic SFE protocols, we • Formalize the notion of parallel reducibility, where sub-protocols can be run at the same time; • Clarify that there are two distinct forms of parallel reducibility: Concurrent reducibility, which applies when the order of the subprotocol calls is not important (and which reduces the round complexity dramatically as compared to sequential reducibility); and Synchronous reducibility, which applies when the sub-protocols must be executed simultaneously (and which allows modular design in settings where sequential reducibility does not even apply). • Show that a large class of SFE protocols (i.e., those satisfying a slight modification of the original definition of Micali and Rogaway [15]) provably enjoy (both forms of) parallel reducibility.