Paper 2025/354

Delayed-Input Multi-Party Computation

Abstract

In this work, we consider the setting where the process of securely evaluating a multi-party functionality is divided into two phases: offline (or preprocessing) and online. The offline phase is independent of the parties’ inputs, whereas the online phase does require the knowledge of the inputs. We consider the problem of minimizing the round of communication required in the online phase and propose a round preserving compiler that can turn a big class of multi-party computation (MPC) protocols into protocols in which only the last two rounds are input-dependent. Our compiler can be applied to a big class of MPC protocols, and in particular to all existing round-optimal MPC protocols. All our results assume no setup and are proven in the dishonest majority setting with black-box simulation. As part of our contribution, we propose a new definition we call Multi-Party Computation with Adaptive-Input Selection, which allows the distinguisher to craft the inputs the honest parties should use during the online phase, adaptively on the offline phase. This new definition is needed to argue that not only are the messages of the offline phase input-independent but also that security holds even in the stronger (and realistic) adversarial setting where the inputs may depend on some of the offline-phase protocol messages. We argue that this is the definition that any protocol should satisfy to be securely used while preprocessing part of the rounds. We are the first to study this definition in a setting where there is no setup, and the majority of the parties can be corrupted. Prior definitions have been presented in the Universal Composable framework, which is unfortunately not well suited for our setting (i.e., no setup and dishonest majority). As a corollary, we obtain the first four-round (which is optimal) MPC protocol, where the first two rounds can be preprocessed, and its security holds against adaptive-input selection.