Consensus in Multi Party Computation

Abstract Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) protocols allow mutually distrusting parties to compute a function of their inputs without revealing their inputs. Consensus protocols allow mutually distrusting parties to agree on a common output. This article surveys how consensus can help to build MPC protocols that tolerate more corruptions and provide improved security. We describe what MPC results can be achieved with and without consensus, and give intuitions behind these results.