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Nick Szabo -- Mutually Confidential Computation

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Imagine the ideal protocol. It would have the most trustworthy third party imaginable -- a diety who is on everybody's side. All the parties would send their inputs to God. God would reliably determine the results and return the outputs. God being the ultimate in confessional discretion, no party would learn anything more about the other parties' inputs than they could learn from their own inputs and the output. Alas, in the our temporal world we deal with humans rather than deities. Yet, too often we are forced to treat people in a nearly theological manner, because our infrastructure lacks the security needed to protect ourselves. Network security theorists have recently solved this problem to an astonishing extent. They have developed protocols which create virtual machines between two or more parties. Multiparty secure computation allows any number of parties to share a computation, each learning only what can be inferred from their own inputs and the output of the computation. The

Nick Szabo -- Mutually Confidential Computation The God Protocols Copyright (c) 1997-1999 by Nick Szabo permission to redistribute without alteration hereby granted Imagine the ideal protocol. It would have the most trustworthy third party imaginable -- a diety who is on everybody's side. All the parties would send their inputs to God. God would reliably determine the results and return the outputs. God being the ultimate in confessional discretion, no party would learn anything more about the other parties' inputs than they could learn from their own inputs and the output. Alas, in the our te

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