Privacy-Preserving Computation with Trusted Computing via Scramble-then-Compute
Authors: Hung Dang (National University of Singapore), Tien Tuan Anh Dinh (National University of Singapore), Ee-Chien Chang (National University of Singapore), Beng Chin Ooi (National University of Singapore)
Volume: 2017
Issue: 3
Pages: 21–38
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/popets-2017-0026
Abstract: We consider privacy-preserving computation of big data using trusted computing primitives with limited private memory. Simply ensuring that the data remains encrypted outside the trusted computing environment is insufficient to preserve data privacy, for data movement observed during computation could leak information. While it is possible to thwart such leakage using generic solution such as ORAM [42], designing efficient privacy-preserving algorithms is challenging. Besides computation efficiency, it is critical to keep trusted code bases lean, for large ones are unwieldy to vet and verify. In this paper, we advocate a simple approach wherein many basic algorithms (e.g., sorting) can be made privacy-preserving by adding a step that securely scrambles the data before feeding it to the original algorithms. We call this approach Scramblethen-Compute (StC), and give a sufficient condition whereby existing external memory algorithms can be made privacy-preserving via StC. This approach facilitates code-reuse, and its simplicity contributes to a smaller trusted code base. It is also general, allowing algorithm designers to leverage an extensive body of known efficient algorithms for better performance. Our experiments show that StC could offer up to 4.1× speedups over known, application-specific alternatives.
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