One-Time Programs made Practical
Abstract
A one-time program (OTP) works as follows: Alice provides Bob with the implementation of some function. Bob can have the function evaluated exclusively on a single input of his choosing. Once executed, the program will fail to evaluate on any other input. State-of-the-art one-time programs have remained theoretical, requiring custom hardware that is cost-ineffective/unavailable, or confined to adhoc/unrealistic assumptions. To bridge this gap, we explore how the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) of modern CPUs can realize the OTP functionality. Specifically, we build two flavours of such a system: in the first, the TEE directly enforces the one-timeness of the program; in the second, the program is represented with a garbled circuit and the TEE ensures Bob's input can only be wired into the circuit once, equivalent to a smaller cryptographic primitive called one-time memory. These have different performance profiles: the first is best when Alice's input is small and Bob's is large, and the second for the converse.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1907.00935,
title = {One-Time Programs made Practical},
author = {Lianying Zhao and Joseph I. Choi and Didem Demirag and Kevin R. B. Butler and Mohammad Mannan and Erman Ayday and Jeremy Clark},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.00935},
year = {2019}
}