A Shannon Approach to Secure Multi-party Computations

Abstract: In secure multi-party computations (SMC), parties wish to compute a function on their private data without revealing more information about their data than what the function reveals. In this paper, we investigate two Shannon-type questions on this problem. We first consider the traditional one-shot model for SMC which does not assume a probabilistic prior on the data. In this model, private communication and randomness are the key enablers to secure computing, and we investigate a notion of randomness cost and capacity. We then move to a probabilistic model for the data, and propose a Shannon model for discrete memoryless SMC. In this model, correlations among data are the key enablers for secure computing, and we investigate a notion of dependency which permits the secure computation of a function. While the models and questions are general, this paper focuses on summation functions, and relies on polar code constructions.