  Recent compilers allow a general-purpose program (written in a conventional
programming language) that handles private data to be translated into secure
distributed implementation of the corresponding functionality. The resulting
program is then guaranteed to provably protect private data using secure
multi-party computation techniques. The goals of such compilers are generality,
usability, and efficiency, but the complete set of features of a modern
programming language has not been supported to date by the existing compilers.
In particular, recent compilers PICCO and the two-party ANSI C compiler strive
to translate any C program into its secure multi-party implementation, but
currently lack support for pointers and dynamic memory allocation, which are
important components of many C programs. In this work, we mitigate the
limitation and add support for pointers to private data and consequently
dynamic memory allocation to the PICCO compiler, enabling it to handle a more
diverse set of programs over private data. Because doing so opens up a new
design space, we investigate the use of pointers to private data (with known as
well as private locations stored in them) in programs and report our findings.
Besides dynamic memory allocation, we examine other important topics associated
with common pointer use such as reference by pointer/address, casting, and
building various data structures in the context of secure multi-party
computation. This results in enabling the compiler to automatically translate a
user program that uses pointers to private data into its distributed
implementation that provably protects private data throughout the computation.
We empirically evaluate the constructions and report on performance of
representative programs.
