On the Practical Feasibiltiy of Secure Distributed Computing: A Case Study
Gregory Neven, Frank Piessens, Bart De Decker · Information Security · 2000
Secure Distributed Computing addresses the problem of performing a computation with a number of mutually distrustful participants, in such a way that each of the participants has only limited access to the in formation needed for doing the computation. Over the past decade, a number of solutions for this problem have been developed. The various proposed solutions differ in the cryptographic primitives that are used, and in the class of computations that can be performed. However, all sufficiently general solutions have one thing in common: the communic ation overhead between the involved parties seems to be prohibitive. In this paper, we consider a concrete instance (with considerable practical interest) of the general problem of secure distributed comput ing, and we investigate how bad the communication overhead really is. This involves tailoring the different general solutions to the specific problem at hand, optimizing them for minimal communication over head, and evaluating the resulting communication overhead.