Implementing support for pointers to private data in a general-purpose secure multi-party compiler

Recent compilers allow a general-purpose program (written in a conventional programming language) that handles private data to be translated into a secure distributed implementation of the corresponding functionality. The resulting program is then guaranteed to provably protect private data using secure multi-party computation techniques. The goals of such compilers are generality, usability, and efficiency, but the complete set of features of a modern programming language has not been supported to date by the existing compilers. In particular, recent compilers PICCO and the two-party ANSI C compiler strive to translate any C program into its secure multi-party implementation, but they currently lack support for pointers and dynamic memory allocation, which are important components of many C programs. In this work, we mitigate the limitation and add support for pointers to private data and consequently dynamic memory allocation to the PICCO compiler, enabling it to handle a more diverse set of programs over private data. Because doing so opens up a new design space, we investigate the use of pointers to private data (with known as well as private locations stored in them) in programs and report our findings. Aside from dynamic memory allocation, we examine other important topics associated with common pointer use such as reference by pointer/address, casting, and building various data structures in the context of secure multi-party computation. This results in enabling the compiler to automatically translate a user program that uses pointers to private data into its distributed implementation that provably protects private data throughout the computation. We empirically evaluate the constructions and report on the performance of representative programs.