Applications of Secure Computation

当涉及到个人信息时，社会需要提供高效和有效的服务与个人的隐私权之间存在着紧张关系。许多服务在分配其有限资源时受益于获得有关个人的详细数据。例如，更多地访问患者信息使医学研究人员能够开发新的和更个性化的治疗方法。与此同时，出现了一系列政策和法律，通过限制分享敏感的个人信息来保护个人隐私。因此，任何既能满足服务提供者的分析需求，又能保护个人隐私的方法，对社会都是有益的。安全多方计算面临的问题是，两个或多个参与方如何进行通信，以回答相互重要的问题，而参与者相互之间的信息不会比结果本身所揭示的信息更多。使用加密技术，这种方法允许个人和组织联合收割机结合其个人和私人信息的分析能力，而无需直接共享。这为回答依赖于访问个人数据的重要问题提供了全新的可能性。**我们提出了一个研究计划，探索新的应用程序的安全计算的实际问题，现实世界的重要性。重点领域将是开发医疗保健领域的安全计算技术。其他重点领域将包括安全的在线投票和数字货币。我们在这些重点领域的以往研究经验使我们采取以下方法：（1）与这些应用领域的服务利益相关者协商，以确定涉及个人和私人数据的分析重要性问题;（2）定义一组安全要求，并开发一个安全的多方计算协议来实现它们;（3）分析协议的安全特性，以确保其满足要求;（4）在软件中对协议进行原型设计，以评估其计算效率，从而评估其可行性。

When it comes to personal information, a tension exists between society's need to provide efficient and effective services, and an individual's right to privacy. Many services benefit from access to detailed data about individuals when allocating their limited resources. For example, greater access to patient information allows medical researchers to develop new and more personalized treatments. At the same time, a range of policies and laws have emerged to protect individual privacy by restricting the sharing of sensitive personal information. Any methodology that could simultaneously meet the analytical needs of service providers while protecting individual privacy, therefore, would be useful to a society.**Secure multi-party computation confronts the problem of how two or more parties can communicate to answer questions of mutual importance, without the participants revealing more to each other than what is revealed by the result itself. Using cryptographic techniques, this approach allows individuals and organizations to combine the analytical power of their personal and private information without ever sharing it directly. This opens the door to fundamentally new possibilities for answering important questions that rely on access to personal data.**We propose a research program exploring new applications of secure computation to questions of practical, real-world importance. The primary area of focus will be to develop secure computation techniques in the field of healthcare. Other key areas of focus will include secure online voting and digital currency. Our previous research experience in these focus areas leads us to the following methodology: (1) consult with stakeholders of services in these application areas to identify questions of analytical importance involving personal and private data; (2) define a set of security requirements and develop a secure multi-party computation protocol to realize them; (3) analyze the security properties of the protocol to ensure it meets the requirements, and (4) prototype the protocol in software to evaluate its computational efficiency, and hence its feasibility.