Network-Agnostic Security Comes (Almost) for Free in DKG and MPC

Summary

Distributed key generation (DKG) protocols are an essential building block for threshold cryptosystems. Many DKG protocols tolerate up to ts < n/2 corruptions assuming a well-behaved synchronous network, but become insecure as soon as the network delay becomes unstable. On the other hand, solutions in the asynchronous model operate under arbitrary network conditions, but only tolerate ta < n/3 corruptions, even when the network is well-behaved. In this work, we ask whether one can design a protocol that achieves security guarantees in either scenario. We show a complete characterization of network-agnostic DKG protocols, showing that the tight bound is ta + 2ts < n. As a second contribution, we provide an optimized version of the network-agnostic multi-party computation (MPC) protocol by Blum, Liu-Zhang and Loss [CRYPTO’20] which improves over the communication complexity of their protocol by a linear factor. Moreover, using our DKG protocol, we can instantiate our MPC protocol in the plain PKI model, i.e., without the need to assume an expensive trusted setup. Our protocols incur comparable communication complexity as state-of-the-art DKG and MPC protocols with optimal resilience in their respective purely synchronous and asynchronous settings, thereby showing that network-agnostic security comes (almost) for free.