Progress of Secure Computation: Basic Constructions and Dedicated Algorithms

Abstract

Secure computation has been a major research topic in cryptography since the 1980s. It can accelerate the application of sensitive data since one can analyze data while ensuring their secrecy by using secure computation. Despite this advantage of secure computation, it has not been widely used in practice, one of the main reasons being its inefficiency. Secure computation tends to require heavy computation and communication compared with computation in the clear. In addition, we cannot use an efficient algorithm in secure computation without careful consideration of how not to violate the security. However, the performance of secure computation has been greatly improved recently, and secure computation is expected to be increasingly used in practice. In this paper, we introduce several techniques to carry out secure computation and algorithms to improve the performance of secure computation.