Increasing incidents of security compromises and privacy leakage have raised
serious privacy concerns related to cyberspace. Such privacy concerns have been
instrumental in the creation of several regulations and acts to restrict the
availability and use of privacy-sensitive data. The secure computation problem,
initially and formally introduced as secure two-party computation by Andrew Yao
in 1986, has been the focus of intense research in academia because of its
fundamental role in building many of the existing privacy-preserving
approaches. Most of the existing secure computation solutions rely on
garbled-circuits and homomorphic encryption techniques to tackle secure
computation issues, including efficiency and security guarantees. However, it
is still challenging to adopt these secure computation approaches in emerging
compute-intensive and data-intensive applications such as emerging machine
learning solutions. Recently proposed functional encryption scheme has shown
its promise as an underlying secure computation foundation in recent
privacy-preserving machine learning approaches proposed. This paper revisits
the secure computation problem using emerging and promising functional
encryption techniques and presents a comprehensive study. We first briefly
summarize existing conventional secure computation approaches built on
garbled-circuits, oblivious transfer, and homomorphic encryption techniques.
Then, we elaborate on the unique characteristics and challenges of emerging
functional encryption based secure computation approaches and outline several
research directions.