Multi-Party Computation (MPC) explained

As organisations exchange sensitive information, concerns about privacy breaches and data leaks loom large. Today, we will tell you about Multi-Party Computation (MPC), a groundbreaking cryptographic technique that promises to revolutionise the way data is shared, ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and privacy.

What is MPC?

Multi-Party Computation, often abbreviated as MPC, is a cryptographic protocol that enables multiple parties to jointly compute a function over their inputs while keeping those inputs private. In simpler terms, it allows different entities to collaborate on computing a result without revealing their individual data.

How MPC Works

• Secure Collaboration: MPC allows several parties, each holding private input data, to collaborate on computing a specific function or result without revealing their raw inputs to one another. This collaboration happens through a secure and encrypted process that ensures data confidentiality.
• Divide and Conquer: To achieve this, the input data is divided into shares, and each party holds one share. The parties then engage in a secure computation process, revealing only the necessary information to compute the desired function. The final result is obtained without exposing the raw data.
• Privacy-Preserving Protocols: Various cryptographic techniques, such as homomorphic encryption, secret sharing, and secure function evaluation, are employed to ensure privacy during the computation. These protocols ensure that even if some parties collude, they cannot reconstruct the individual inputs.

Applications of Multi-Party Computation

• Secure Data Analysis: MPC finds applications in scenarios where multiple entities need to jointly analyse sensitive data without compromising privacy. For example, healthcare providers can collaborate on medical research without disclosing individual patient records.
• Financial Transactions: In financial transactions, multiple parties can compute complex financial functions without revealing their proprietary trading algorithms or sensitive data, enhancing the security of transactions. By the way, COCA, in partnership with Wirex, recently unveiled the world's first MPC wallet accompanied by a non-custodial debit card.
• Supply Chain Management: MPC is valuable in supply chain management, allowing different stakeholders to share critical information, such as inventory levels or production schedules, without revealing sensitive business strategies.
• Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning: MPC is increasingly being used in machine learning collaborations, enabling organisations to train models on combined datasets without exposing the underlying data. This is particularly beneficial in sectors like healthcare and finance.

As organisations increasingly recognise the value of collaborative computing without compromising confidentiality, MPC is poised to become an integral part of the evolving landscape of cybersecurity and data privacy.