[viff-devel] Fwd: error while installing viff

[Martin Geisler]

"Amitabh Saxena" <amitabh123 at gmail.com> writes:

Hi Amihabh

> FYI, I am sending to the mailing list so others can join the
> discussion.

Excellent, thanks!

> The functionality we need is the ability to work with floating point
> numbers.

Do you mean local computations on such numbers or do you mean secret
shared floating point numbers?

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Amitabh Saxena <amitabh123 at gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 2:08 PM
> Subject: Re: error while installing viff
> To: Martin Geisler <mg at daimi.au.dk>
>
>
> Thanks Martin,
>
> I will try the installation procedure again. We am interested in
> coding some MPC functionality which might be implementable with
> existing VIFF framework. However, that may not be efficient enough
> for us, in which case an addon might be needed.

About the efficiency, then our thesis is that the runtime is bounded
by the network latency, and not the local computations. This is also
the standard assumption when modelling the runtime of MPC protocols.

Whether or not this is really true is something I'll take a closer
look at soon now, i.e., getting more detailed benchmark results.
You're definitely right that Python is a language with a large
overhead at runtime, but I find the programmer overhead to be much,
much smaller than something like Java...

One might be implement something similar in a language like C++, which
has function pointers used extensively by VIFF. The problem is that
I'm not a very good C++ programmer :-)

> Out of curiosity, why did you choose python as your language?

Well, I has played around with Python and liked the language. And then
I got the idea of using Twisted to handle all the asynchronous stuff.
The Deferred concept there fits extremely well with the way we think
of asynchronous MPC. I had a system up and running in a couple of
weeks and with a couple of hundred lines of code.

There are some more background here:

  http://viff.dk/doc/tip/history.html

Everybody: let me know if you find inaccuracies in this...

-- 
Martin Geisler

VIFF (Virtual Ideal Functionality Framework) brings easy and efficient
SMPC (Secure Multi-Party Computation) to Python. See: http://viff.dk/.