Secure evaluation of private linear branching programs with medical applications

  • Authors:
  • Mauro Barni;Pierluigi Failla;Vladimir Kolesnikov;Riccardo Lazzeretti;Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi;Thomas Schneider

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Information Engineering, University of Siena, Italy;Department of Information Engineering, University of Siena, Italy;Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ;Department of Information Engineering, University of Siena, Italy;Horst Görtz Institute for IT-Security, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany;Horst Görtz Institute for IT-Security, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany

  • Venue:
  • ESORICS'09 Proceedings of the 14th European conference on Research in computer security
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Diagnostic and classification algorithms play an important role in data analysis, with applications in areas such as health care, fault diagnostics, or benchmarking. Branching programs (BP) is a popular representation model for describing the underlying classification/diagnostics algorithms. Typical application scenarios involve a client who provides data and a service provider (server) whose diagnostic program is run on client's data. Both parties need to keep their inputs private. We present new, more efficient privacy-protecting protocols for remote evaluation of such classification/diagnostic programs. In addition to efficiency improvements, we generalize previous solutions - we securely evaluate private linear branching programs (LBP), a useful generalization of BP that we introduce. We show practicality of our solutions: we apply our protocols to the privacy-preserving classification of medical ElectroCardioGram (ECG) signals and present implementation results. Finally, we discover and fix a subtle security weakness of the most recent remote diagnostic proposal, which allowed malicious clients to learn partial information about the program.