# Why do authors execute a leakage resilient election protocol inside a leak-free phase?

In the paper "Multiparty Computation Secure Against Continual Memory Leakage", on page 1241 (that's page 7 of the PDF) under section 2.3, the authors discuss "The Election Protocol" that they use to elect committees. The election protocol they use guarantees a constant fraction of honest parties and that each committee holds roughly the same number of parties.

In the same paper on page 1249 (that's page 15 of the PDF), you see the pre-proc phase is boxed in with 4 steps. The first step happens to be the execution of the election protocol. Why does it have to execute inside the pre-proc box if the election protocol is leakage-resilient? The sole purpose of pre-proc box is to assume a leak-free environment. However, if the election protocol is leakage resilient… why on earth would the authors stick it in the pre-proc box?

This is baffling me. If I would have written the paper, I would have moved the election out of the pre-proc box before pre-proc even starts.

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If it's leakage-resilient, then the leakage-resilience that it has is probably not enough for leakage-resistance. $\:$ However, I do not see any claim by the authors that the election protocol is leakage-resilient. $\hspace{1.07 in}$ –  Ricky Demer Feb 4 '14 at 4:12
@RickyDemer - the reason I believe election is leakage resilient is because on pg. 1242 of the paper at the top it says "a constant fraction of honest parties will be needed for weakly leakage-resilient MPC". If I pull the election out of the pre-proc box, would I still be able to gaurantee a constant fraction of honest parties? I guess my big question is why exactly is the election being done inside the pre-proc box. The authors must have put it there for a reason. –  user11460 Feb 5 '14 at 2:27
errr... that just says the resulting MPC will be weakly leakage-resilient, not that the election protocol is leakage resilient. $\:$ I doubt it, since the authors probably put the election inside the pre-proc box because the election is not leakage-resilient. $\;\;\;\;$ –  Ricky Demer Feb 5 '14 at 2:36
@RickyDemer - So basically you are saying both of us don't have enough evidence for either side (whether it is or is not leakage resilient). So now you see my confusion. –  user11460 Feb 6 '14 at 1:44
I don't see your confusion. $\:$ They want to be able to show that their protocol can tolerate leakage in the online phases, so since the election protocol has not been shown to be leakage resistant, they put the election protocol in the pre-processing phase. $\;\;\;\;$ –  Ricky Demer Feb 6 '14 at 3:08