ARPA Codebase Now Open-Sourced, Taking Privacy-Preserving Computation to the Next Level With Global Developers

4 min readApr 15, 2021

Dear community,

Today we share with you a piece of exciting news: ARPA codebase is now fully open-sourced. You can view the development progress of ARPA on GitLab, discuss and research multiparty privacy-preserving computing technologies with us. We strive for a digital world where privacy is protected, and data is securely shared.

After 3 years of extensive research and engineering, from prototypes to MPC mainnet, we have accumulated valuable knowledge of cryptography and insights into the Blockchain industry. Now we are combining our specialties in MPC with a vision of Blockchain 3.0, aiming to deliver infrastructures that will facilitate mass adoption of NFTs across different industries. VRF will be the first part of the infrastructure we present.

We believe that most creations now and in the future are digital native, let it be motion pictures, animations, music, art, 3D modeling, or games. NFTs have great potential in helping creators monetize and protect their IP, revolutionizing the circulation and distribution of digital assets. We wish to contribute to building a more fair and transparent marketplace for both the content creator and the consumers.

Our computation nodes use linear secret sharing scheme (LSSS)-based MPC as a building block, and integrate with functionalities like autonomous networking, task distribution, and node maintenance. Besides the ARPA network, proxy smart contracts are deployed as the bridge to link the blockchain and secure the computation network. Additionally, they will be used as verifiers to ensure that outsourced computation is completed correctly.

Alongside the implementation of ARPA, experimental researches are also put in this group. To keep us updated with the cutting-edge MPC frameworks and other privacy techniques, we continuously focus on MPC-related implementations and testing real-world use cases on them.

Contents of the Codebase

All repos under the GitLab group ARPA.io can be categorized into three types, including

Components of ARPA secure computation network

arpa_smart_contract: the interface that connects ARPA computation network with Ethereum.
coordinator: centralized coordinator responsible for network setup.
mainnet-mpc_agent: A script agent that starts MPC and sends the output via WebSocket on a VM instance.
mpc: ARPA computation node core
mpc-network: An early version of ARPA computation node core
mpc_prototype: A proof-of-concept website of MPC network with SCALE MAMBA. https://github.com/KULeuven-COSIC/SCALE-MAMBA

2. MPC sample tasks for mainnet and testnet

example_mpc_programs: The MPC computation tasks under development.
mainnet-mpc-task: The sample MPC computation tasks run in mainnet.
whitepaper: The Latex source code of ARPA whitepaper in English and Simplified Chinese.

3. Experiments on third-party MPC framework

private-join-and-compute: This is the MPC framework that implements high-performance private intersections. We modified it to apply to our specific use cases.
aby3: This is the MPC framework that designs for privacy-preserving machine learning. We tried to use this on large-scale data analysis and cross-tabulation.

Warning

Despite the fact that ARPA mainnet has been running for over a year and finished thousands of MPC computations. It still should NOT be considered fully secure. Only use this codebase as a proof-of-concept or benchmark. Future improvements and fixes are needed to make it more sound, secure, and robust.

About ARPA

ARPA is a blockchain-based solution for privacy-preserving computation, enabled by Multi-Party Computation (“MPC”). Founded in April 2018, the goal of ARPA is to separate data utility from ownership and enable data renting. ARPA’s MPC protocol creates ways for multiple entities to collaboratively analyze data and extract data synergies while keeping each party’s data input private and secure. ARPA allows secret sharing of private data, and the correctness of computation is verifiable using information-theoretic Message Authentication Code (MAC).

Developers can build privacy-preserving dApps on blockchains compatible with ARPA. Some immediate use cases include: credit anti-fraud, secure data wallet, precision marketing, joint AI model training, key management systems, etc. For example, banks using the ARPA network can share their credit blacklist for risk management purposes without exposing their customer data or privacy.

Team members have worked at leading institutions such as Google, Amazon, Huawei, Fosun, Tsinghua University, Fidelity Investments. ARPA is currently assisting the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology in setting the national standard for secure multi-party computation. ARPA is a corporate member of MPC Alliance and IEEE and is in partnership with fortune 500 companies to implement proofs-of-concept and MPC products. In 2019, ARPA was named the Top 10 most innovative blockchain companies in China by China Enterprise News and China Software Industry Association.

For more information about ARPA or to join our team, please contact us at about@arpachain.io.

Learn about ARPA’s recent official news：

Telegram (English): https://t.me/arpa_community

Telegram (Việt Nam): https://t.me/ARPAVietnam

Telegram (Russian): https://t.me/arpa_community_ru

Telegram (Indonesian): https://t.me/Arpa_Indonesia

Telegram (Thai): https://t.me/Arpa_Thai

Telegram (Turkish): https://t.me/Arpa_Turkey

Telegram(Sri Lanka):https://t.me/arpa_srilanka

Telegram(Africa):https://t.me/arpaafrica

Korean Chats: https://open.kakao.com/o/giExbhmb (Kakao) & https://t.me/arpakoreanofficial (Telegram, new)

Medium: https://medium.com/@arpa