Martin Geisler Online

A lot is happening in the Python world right now:

• VIFF 0.4 was released two weeks ago. It has the usual number of bug fixes and introduces new asymmetric commands. This means that you can write MPC programs where only a subset of the players give or receive output.

• Mercurial 1.0 has been released! I have been a happy Mercurial user for about a year now, and I must say that I’m very impressed with the speed and flexibility it offers. Subversion was simpler and cleaner than CVS, and Mercurial is even simpler, yet more powerfull. I strongly suggest that you consider using Mercurial for your next project, it is already used by large players like Mozilla and Solaris.

• Twisted 8.0 is also freshly released. We are using Twisted in VIFF, and I have been very happy with it. The Twisted code has this nice property that when you read it you realize that there is no magic going on and that things are generally written the way you would expect them to be.

Happy hacking!

Tonight I released the third major version of VIFF: version 0.3. This version introduces secure communication using Transport Layer Security (TLS, the successor to SSL). This is quite cool, for that means that we can finally judge the performance in a realistic setting with all the network overhead. My initial benchmarking seems to indicate that TLS gives no or only a very little slowdown.

You can download VIFF from http://viff.dk/.

Version 0.2 of my little pet project has been released! Changes since version 0.1.1 include:

Implemented overloaded arithmetic operators, so w = x + y * z now adds and multiplies the three shares as expected. Updated API documentation. Released using a Distutils setup.py script.

Get it at http://viff.dk/

In my last post I asked you what name you preferred for my cryptographic runtime, and the winner is VIFF, which stands for Virtual Ideal Functionality Framework. Now I just need someone to make a logo with a cute little dog that says “Viff!” :-)

I packaged things up in a 0.1 release — VIFF is now online at http://viff.dk/ with the Mercurial repository at http://hg.viff.dk/viff/. If you are interested in the development of VIFF, then consider subscribing to new releases on Freshmeat. There will be a mailinglist up as soon as Gmane approves my application, stay tuned!

Some people complained that my last post contained too much text… I’ll make this shorter :-)

A week ago I asked you to help me find a name for a project I am working on. The project is a library of tools for writing secure multi-party computations in Python, and thus I have been calling it PySMPC until now. But since the project might one day be rewritten in another language, I would prefer to have another name.

Tord, Dan and Chris suggested new names, and including the ones I had come up with myself, we now have (in alphabetical order):

• AMPC: Asynchronous Multi-Party Computation, 1 vote
• AntiTrust
• DTTP: Distributed Trusted Third Party, 1 vote
• Jokke: no idea what that would mean, but Rune votes for it. 1 vote
• NoTrent
• NoTTP: No Trusted Third Party
• NoTrust
• PEBLE: Paranoid Economy Benchmarking Liability Elimination
• SMPC: Secure Multi-Party Computation, 2 votes
• smpacman: secure multi-party comp. manager, 1 vote
• Trent
• VIFF: Virtual Ideal Functionality Framework, 3 votes (give or take an ∞ or two…)

Please vote for your favorite name (multiple votes are okay) by leaving a comment.