Information theory and secure multi-party computation

Two types of generalizations in secure multi-party computation are described. First, we report on a new general adversary model: while previous protocols were designed to tolerate misbehavior of one of two types (active or passive adversaries) the new protocols tolerate mixed types of adversaries, i.e. an adversary that can corrupt players actively, passively, or can let them crash (i.e. stop execution). We derive the necessary and sufficient conditions under which such a general adversary can be tolerated. Second, we present a generic protocol framework that unifies previous approaches achieving unconditional (or information-theoretic) security and cryptographic security (i.e. security based on a cryptographic intractability assumption). This is achieved by introducing secret sharing schemes with an additional property called the multiplication property and a new type of homomorphic commitment scheme, and by generalizing the concept of commitments.