Secure Computation on the Web: Computing without Simultaneous Interaction

Secure computation enables mutually suspicious parties to compute a joint function of their private inputs while providing strong security guarantees. Amongst other things, even if some of the participants are corrupted the output is still correctly computed, and parties do not learn anything about each other's inputs except for that output. Despite the power and generality of secure computation, its use in practice seems limited. The authors argue that one of the reasons for this is that the model of computation on the web is not suited to the type of communication patterns needed for secure computation. Specifically, in most web scenarios clients independently connect to servers, interact with them and then leave.