Client Interface¶

The ExternalIO directory contains an example of managing I/O between external client processes and parties running MP-SPDZ engines. These instructions assume that MP-SPDZ has been built as per the project readme.

Working Examples¶

bankers-bonus-client.cpp and bankers-bonus-client.py act as a client to bankers_bonus.mpc and demonstrates sending input and receiving output as described by Damgård et al. The computation allows up to eight clients to input a number and computes the client with the largest input. You can run the C++ code as follows from the main directory:

make bankers-bonus-client.x
./compile.py bankers_bonus 1
Scripts/setup-ssl.sh <nparties>
Scripts/setup-clients.sh 3
PLAYERS=<nparties> Scripts/<protocol>.sh bankers_bonus-1 &
./bankers-bonus-client.x 0 <nparties> 100 0 &
./bankers-bonus-client.x 1 <nparties> 200 0 &
./bankers-bonus-client.x 2 <nparties> 50 1

<protocol> can be any arithmetic protocol (e.g., mascot) but not a binary protocol (e.g., yao). This should output that the winning id is 1. Note that the ids have to be incremental, and the client with the highest id has to input 1 as the last argument while the others have to input 0 there. Furthermore, <nparties> refers to the number of parties running the computation not the number of clients, and <protocol> can be the name of protocol script. The setup scripts generate the necessary SSL certificates and keys. Therefore, if you run the computation on different hosts, you will have to distribute the *.pem files.

For the Python client, make sure to install gmpy2, and run ExternalIO/bankers-bonus-client.py instead of bankers-bonus-client.x.

I/O MPC Instructions¶

Connection Setup¶

Data Exchange¶

Only the sint methods used in the example are documented here, equivalent methods are available for other data types. See the reference.

Client-Side Interface¶

The example uses the Client class implemented in ExternalIO/Client.hpp to handle the communication, see this reference for documentation.