MPC-as-a-Service: A Customizable Management Protocol for Running Multi-party Computation on IoT Devices

Techniques to perform computations without disclosing the input values have notably improved in the last decade. One such technology, called Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC), where two or more computation nodes hold secret pieces of private data and jointly execute a protocol to obtain a function output, has proven effective for preserving privacy in many applications (e.g., distributed signing, financial scores, machine learning, and more). Nonetheless, in many cases, the data source and computation nodes are often assumed to be the same, with the existence of a manually preconfigured network before they start the computation. This challenge is typical of many IoT applications where the IoT devices need to collaborate using MPC but do not have the resources, and thus outsource the tasks to powerful MPC nodes. Nonetheless, in such a scenario, the IoT devices do not know the MPC nodes, and vice-versa to manage the overall process. To fill this gap, we propose an MPC management protocol that automates the registration and authentication of a group of clients (i.e., sources and consumers of data) and MPC servers (the private computation providers), the requesting of MPC jobs, and receiving the results thereafter. Our experiments over a cloud environment demonstrate the first protocol that efficiently and securely automates the management of MPC systems on many use cases, which would otherwise take considerable time and effort.