Compilation for Secure Two-Party Computations

Secure two-party computation (STC) is a computer security paradigm that enables two distrusting parties to jointly compute on sensitive input data. While both parties are interested in the outcome of the computation, they are not willing to share their data with each other. Until recently, STC was deemed theoretical and impractical. However, novel efficient cryptographic primitives bring STC well within practical reach. Indeed, custom-tailored commercial STC products already appeared on the market. Unfortunately, a widespread application of STC is still hindered by the difficulty to implement STC protocols. While recent work proposed simple programming languages for the specification of STCs, they are still difficult to use for practitioners, and translating existing source code into this format is cumbersome. Similarly, the manual construction of STC protocols is labor intensive and error-prone. We discuss recent work that forms a significant step towards practically realizable STCs that can be integrated into modern software engineering frameworks. In particular, we discuss the compiler CBMC-GC which uses model checking techniques to automatically generate efficient STC protocols from ANSI C programs. Experimental results demonstrate CBMC-GC’s practical usefulness.