Chinese Journal of Electronics
Vol.24, No.4, Oct. 2015
Efficient Protocols for the General Millionaires’
Problem
∗
LI Shundong
1
, GUO Yimin
1
, ZHOU Sufang
1
, DOU Jiawei
2
and WANG Daoshun
3
(1. School of Computer Science, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an 710119, China)
(2. School of Mathematics and Information Science, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an 710119 China)
(3. Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China)
Abstract — Secure multiparty computation (SMC) is
a research focus in the international cryptographic com-
munity. The protocols used to address the millionaires’
problem are the basic building blocks of most SMC proto-
cols and their efficiency dominates that of many other SMC
protocols. To the best of our knowledge, almost all pro-
tocols used to address the millionaires’ problem are based
on integers, which means that their applications are lim-
ited. In this study, we propose precise and efficient proto-
cols for rational numbers based on additively homomorphic
encryptions. One of our protocols is inspired by computa-
tional geometry and it reduces the millionaires’ problem to
computing the area of a triangle formed by three private
points. This approach can determine whether the relation-
ship between two private inputs is greater than, equal to or
less than, and it has a much lower computational complex-
ity compared with existing methods. We proved that these
protocols are secure using simulation paradigm. Our ap-
proaches can be used in many SMC protocols that involve
rational numbers and integers, and they can also be used
directly to solve some secure multiparty computational ge-
ometry problem in rational number field.
Key words — General millionaires’ problem, Secure
multiparty computation, Rational number, Computational
geometry, Homomorphic encryption
I. Introduction
Secure multiparty computation
[1]
(SMC) has been one
of the key research fields in the international crypto-
graphic community in recent years. In SMC, two or more
parties want to compute a result cooperatively based on
each party’s data without leaking any private informa-
tion. Hence, the participants can maximize the utiliza-
tion of private data while still preserving their privacy.
The applications of SMC are already widespread in elec-
tronic commerce, secret sharing, outsourced computation,
secure data structures and other areas.
Goldreich et al.
[2,3]
extended two-party private com-
putation to multiple parties and defined the security of an
SMC protocol. They proved that general SMC problems
are solvable and noted that specific SMC problems require
particular solutions to guarantee their computational effi-
ciency. Another considerable achievement
[3]
reported by
Goldreich was proving that an SMC problem that is solv-
able in a semi-honest model can also be solved in a mali-
cious setting. Many SMC problems has been studied, such
as the millionaires’ problem
[1,4−10]
, private cooperative
computation
[11]
, private bidding and auction
[12]
, privacy-
preserving data mining
[13]
, privacy-preserving intrusion
detection
[14]
, rational secure multiparty computation
[15]
,
and secure multiparty computational geometry
[16,17]
.
When constructing protocols to solve these problems,
the most basic building block is the millionaires’ problem,
which was first introduced by Yao
[1]
. Previous researchers
have regarded the millionaires’ problem as a significant
primitive in the cryptographic field and they have used
the solution to this problem to address other difficult se-
curity issues. Thus, it is important to design an efficient
protocol for the millionaires’ problem that is applicable
to rational numbers.
1. Related work
Yao
[1]
first proposed the concept of SMC as Yao’s mil-
lionaires’ problem. This problem aims to determine which
of two millionaires (Alice and Bob) has more assets with-
out leaking their property values. Yao described a proto-
col in Ref.[1], but its efficiency is low. Subsequently, many
researchers have studied this problem extensively. Sev-
eral major achievements have been made in recent years,
which have greatly boosted the development of SMC.
Fischlin
[4]
described a non-interactive protocol to solve
∗
Manuscript Received ; Accepted . This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.61272435,
No.61373020)