Secure Multi-party Computation has been continuously paid attention since it was raised by Prof. Andrew Chi-Chih Yao in 1980s. It not only is the basic research of safety protocol but also has clear applications in many fields. In 1997, Goldwasser stated in the invited talk titled Secure Multi-party Computation: Past and Present, “We believe that the field of multi-party computation is today where public-key cryptography was ten years ago.” Although this statement has not come true, security and privacy protection of outsourced data storage and data multi-party collaborated processing and application have become the hot topics as the raising of cloud computing, big data, etc., thus Secure Multi-party Computation has been drawing attentions widely in recent years.

CRYPTO 2017 and EUROCRYPT 2017 set two sections for Secure Multi-party (Two-party) Computation respectively, and 14 articles were included in the proceedings. The sudden breaking through of blockchain technique finds the new application for Secure Multi-party Computation, as the important protocol design foundation for consensus mechanism of digital money and blockchain, privacy protection, and so on. The theoretic and application research of Secure Multi-party Computation is becoming the new round of hot topic.

There are ways to submit to this special column. Log on to the website of the journal at http://www.jcr.cacrnet.org.cn, or email to the fellow guest editors directly at xql@sdu.edu.cn for Professor XU Qiu-Liang and ctang@gzhu.edu.cn for Professor TANG Chun-Ming. Please mark the Special Column “Secure Multi-party Computation” on the cover page of the manuscript.