An Introduction to Silent Secure Computation

Secure computation allows any number of mutually distrustful parties to jointly run an

arbitrary computation on their combined inputs without compromising their privacy. Secure

computation offers a theoretical solution to a vast array of problems where one wishes to

simultaneously maintain a fine-grained control over the users' privacy and have flexibility

in how their data is used in a protocol. Over the past decade, secure computation has

largely emerged from the depth of theoretical research to enter the realm of practically-usable

technologies, and secure protocols are now routinely implemented and deployed. This is

the result of a widespread and ongoing research effort from the cryptography community,

which has produced a diverse ecosystem of protocols and paradigms optimized for a variety

of concrete applications. This book covers one such recent paradigm, the area of silent

secure computation, which strikes a careful balance between communication and computation

overheads. This paradigm has recently emerged as a promising path towards fast secure

computation in bandwidth-restricted settings, and has had a significant influence on the

landscape of practical secure computation. The goal of the book is to provide an accessible

introduction to silent secure computation. It is aimed at Ph.D. students and researchers

in cryptography and has a strong focus on explaining the intuitions and giving the reader

a sense of scale, in the hope of conveying insights about the practicality of silent secure

computation in various contexts and to give a clear overview of some of the core challenges

in the field.