Frigate: A Validated, Extensible, and Efficient Compiler and Interpreter for Secure Computation

Recent developments in secure computation have led to significant improvements in efficiency and functionality. These efforts created compilers that form the backbone of practical secure computation research. Unfortunately, many of the artifacts that are being used to demonstrate new research for secure computation are incomplete, incorrect, or unstable, leading to demonstrably erroneous results and inefficiencies - extending even to the most recently developed compiler systems. This is a problem because it hampers research and undermines feasibility tests when other researchers attempt to use these tools. We address these problems and present Frigate, a principled compiler and fast circuit interpreter for secure computation. To ensure correctness we apply best practices for compiler design and development, including the use of standard data structures, helpful negative results, and structured validation testing. Our systematic validation tests include checks on the internal compiler state, combinations of operators, and edge cases based on widely used techniques and errors we have observed in other work. This produces a compiler that builds correct circuits, is efficient and extensible. Frigate creates circuits with gate counts comparable to previous work, but does so with compile time speedups as high as 447x compared with the best results from previous work in circuit compilers. By creating a validated tool, our compiler will allow future secure computation implementations to be developed quickly and correctly.