Understanding Information Disclosure from Secure Computation Output: A Study of Average Salary Computation

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Main Authors: Baccarini, Alessandro, Blanton, Marina, Zou, Shaofeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
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author Baccarini, Alessandro
Blanton, Marina
Zou, Shaofeng
author_facet Baccarini, Alessandro
Blanton, Marina
Zou, Shaofeng
contents Secure multi-party computation has seen substantial performance improvements in recent years and is being increasingly used in commercial products. While a significant amount of work was dedicated to improving its efficiency under standard security models, the threat models do not account for information leakage from the output of secure function evaluation. Quantifying information disclosure about private inputs from observing the function outcome is the subject of this work. Motivated by the City of Boston gender pay gap studies, in this work we focus on the computation of the average of salaries and quantify information disclosure about private inputs of one or more participants (the target) to an adversary via information-theoretic techniques. We study a number of distributions including log-normal, which is typically used for modeling salaries. We consequently evaluate information disclosure after repeated evaluation of the average function on overlapping inputs, as was done in the Boston gender pay study that ran multiple times, and provide recommendations for using the sum and average functions in secure computation applications. Our goal is to develop mechanisms that lower information disclosure about participants' inputs to a desired level and provide guidelines for setting up real-world secure evaluation of this function.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2209_10457
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Understanding Information Disclosure from Secure Computation Output: A Study of Average Salary Computation
Baccarini, Alessandro
Blanton, Marina
Zou, Shaofeng
Cryptography and Security
Information Theory
Secure multi-party computation has seen substantial performance improvements in recent years and is being increasingly used in commercial products. While a significant amount of work was dedicated to improving its efficiency under standard security models, the threat models do not account for information leakage from the output of secure function evaluation. Quantifying information disclosure about private inputs from observing the function outcome is the subject of this work. Motivated by the City of Boston gender pay gap studies, in this work we focus on the computation of the average of salaries and quantify information disclosure about private inputs of one or more participants (the target) to an adversary via information-theoretic techniques. We study a number of distributions including log-normal, which is typically used for modeling salaries. We consequently evaluate information disclosure after repeated evaluation of the average function on overlapping inputs, as was done in the Boston gender pay study that ran multiple times, and provide recommendations for using the sum and average functions in secure computation applications. Our goal is to develop mechanisms that lower information disclosure about participants' inputs to a desired level and provide guidelines for setting up real-world secure evaluation of this function.
title Understanding Information Disclosure from Secure Computation Output: A Study of Average Salary Computation
topic Cryptography and Security
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.10457