In the current digital and decentralized world, there is an imminent need for technologies that can provide a fast approach to compute on private data while guaranteeing secrecy. Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) is one such cryptographic technology that provides an efficient approach to compute on private data. At a high level, MPC is a distributed computation protocol that allows a set of mutually distrusting parties to compute a joint function on their private inputs while only leaking the output and hiding everything else.

Any distributed computation protocol typically involves multiple rounds of back-and-forth interaction between the parties. A key question that is of both theoretical and practical importance is to minimize the number of rounds of such interaction to its absolute limit. This is the problem of constructing round-optimal MPC protocols.

In this talk, I will describe new techniques to construct such round-optimal protocols. These techniques have been instrumental in resolving several long-standing open problems in the area and have also opened up the possibility of constructing practically efficient round-optimal protocols.