Fostering the Uptake of Secure Multiparty Computation in E-Commerce

Secure multiparty computation (SMC) protocols enable a group of mutually distrustful parties to perform a joint computation with private inputs. Novel e-commerce applications have emerged that could benefit from strong privacy protection, e.g., benchmarking, auctions, and collaborative supply chain management and planning. However, the uptake of SMC in these applications is still rare. We argue that this is due to poor performance, functionality, and scalability, as well as architectures that do not meet the needs of e-commerce applications. This paper explores SMC approaches and research directions, aiming at providing better support for e-commerce applications.