Title: The Landscape of Exact Round Complexity in Secure Multi-Party Computation

Abstract: Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) is a central problem in cryptography, often regarded as its holy grail. It enables a group of mutually distrusting data owners to jointly compute a function over their private inputs, while revealing nothing beyond what is inherently implied by the output itself.

Round complexity is one of the most fundamental efficiency measures in MPC, capturing the minimal interaction required for secure computation. In this talk, I will present a high-level overview of the evolution of research on round complexity in MPC and place my own contributions within this evolving landscape.

About the Speaker: Arpita Patra is a Professor of Computer Science at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). Her research focuses on cryptography, with particular emphasis on the theoretical foundations and practical implementations of secure computation protocols. She has authored over 100 publications, and her work has been recognized through numerous honors, including the Google Privacy Research Faculty Award (2023), and the J.P. Morgan Chase Faculty Award (2022), the SONY Faculty Innovation Award (2021), the Google Research Award (2020).

She has coauthored two academic textbooks: Secure Multiparty Computation against Passive Adversaries (Springer, 2023) and Fault Tolerant Distributed Consensus in Synchronous Networks(Springer, 2025).

Beyond academia, she conceived Expedition Aparajita (https://sites.google.com/iisc.ac.in/expeditionaparajita/), an initiative celebrating raw human will—particularly that of women—through extreme endurance challenges. As part of this expedition, she is pursuing the ascent of the highest volcanic and highest peaks across all seven continents, with five volcanic peaks and three peaks already completed. She conditions her body and mind for these expeditions through marathon running, long-distance swimming, and extended cycling.