Abstracts

The BGW Protocol for Perfectly Secure MultiParty Computation

Ashish Choudhury, IIIT Bangalore

Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) is a fundamental problem, both in cryptography as well as distributed computing. Informally, an MPC protocol allows a set of mutually distrusting parties with private inputs to securely compute any joint function of their inputs, by keeping their respective inputs as private as possible. Due to its powerful abstract, the MPC problem has been widely studied over the last several decades. One of the pioneering results in this domain is attributed to BenOr-Goldwasser-Wigderson, who in their seminal STOC 1988 paper proposed the first perfectly-secure MPC protocol. The protocol often referred to as the BGW protocol in the literature remains secure even if a computationally unbounded adversary corrupts a fraction of the protocol participants. Since the security of the protocol is not based on any computational hardness assumptions, it provides everlasting security. The BGW protocol laid the foundation for the plethora of perfectly-secure MPC protocols, which followed after the publication of the BGW protocol. In this talk, we will see and understand this seminal result from a layman's perspective, without assuming any background in cryptography.