My dissertation

[Martin Geisler]

<S.Srinivasan at surrey.ac.uk> writes:

Hi Sriram,

I'll CC this message to the VIFF mailinglist as well -- there are many
people there who can help you if I cannot. Please keep the list as CC on
your replies.

> Hi Martin
>
> I hope you have settled into your new workplace and enjoying yourself.

Thanks, it's going well in my new job.

> I had a few quick queries if you don't mind.
>
> I have been trying to get a grasp on MPC ideas over the past few days.
> I was wondering if you could point me a recent comprehensive, but not
> too heavy survey on MPC. If I could get an idea of how the field has
> progressed and various approaches to achieving MPC without getting
> bogged down in too much detail, it may be helpful for me at this
> stage.

I don't know of such a survey off the top of my head.

> As I understand, VIFF implements the underlying functionality using
> Shamir Secret Sharing. It seems there are other approaches possible as
> well and one of my colleagues wanted to know if VIFF also implements
> the ideas from the paper "Multiparty Computation from Threshold
> Homomorphic Encryption by Ronald Cramer and Ivan Damgard and Jesper
> Buus Nielsen"? My guess is No, but I am not not sure.

Right, we have not implemented the protocols from that paper.

> There are some papers that refer to this latter work, for example
> "Efficient Binary Conversion for Paillier Encrypted Values by Berry
> Schoenmakers and Pim Tuyls". I was wondering if the application in
> this paper can be coded with the functionality provided by VIFF in
> principle, or there are some details which may prevent it from being
> so.

I'm sorry, but I'm not familiar with that paper. But you should think of
VIFF as having a number of layers:

1. basic player administration
2. network setup
3. secret sharing and reconstruction (Shamir-based)
4. secure addition and multiplication
5. more complex protocols

So depending on how the primitive above fits into the stack, you may be
able to reuse more or less code.

> Sorry if my queries don't make sense. I can admit I don't have much
> knowledge of the details and I am trying pick up stuff as I go along.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Best Wishes
>
> Sriram

-- 
Martin Geisler

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