The goal of secure multiparty computation is to transform a given protocol involving a trusted party into a protocol without need for the trusted party, by simulating the party among the players. Indeed, by the same means, one can simulate an arbitrary player in any given protocol. We formally define what it means to simulate a player by a multiparty protocol among a set of (new) players, and we derive the resilience of the new protocol as a function of the resiliences of the original protocol and the protocol used for the simulation. In contrast to all previous protocols that specify the tolerable adversaries by the number of corruptible players (a threshold), we consider general adversaries characterized by an adversary structure, a set of subsets of the player set, where the adversary may corrupt the players of one set in the structure. Recursively applying the simulation technique to standard threshold multiparty protocols results in protocols secure against general adversaries. T...
Martin Hirt, Ueli M. Maurer