RoundRole: Unlocking the Efficiency of Multi-party Computation with Bandwidth-aware Execution
Xiaoyu Fan
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2026 · Day 1 · Distributed Computation
Secure multi-party computation (MPC) is fundamentally constrained by network communication: modern CPUs process data at **30-100 GB/s**, while typical wide-area networks offer only **100 Mbps to 1 Gbps**, leaving CPUs idle waiting for data. The MPC community has made significant progress reducing total data volume and communication rounds, but this talk reveals an overlooked side effect: these optimizations often create **asymmetric communication patterns** where bandwidth utilization is severely unbalanced across parties. The researchers introduce **RoundRole**, an automatic execution-level optimizer that decouples logical roles from physical nodes, rotating role assignments across parallel tasks to achieve **nearly 100% bandwidth utilization** -- delivering significant performance speedups across six protocols and six network configurations.
AI review
A systems-level optimization for MPC that improves bandwidth utilization by rotating logical roles across physical nodes. The observation about asymmetric communication patterns wasting bandwidth is valid, and the results show consistent speedups. But this is a performance engineering contribution with no security implications -- no new attacks, no new defenses, no vulnerability research.