Private Computing with Garbled Circuits [Applications Corner]

摘要

Rapid technological advancesr in multimedia processing,r healthcare, and biometrics,r among others, have givenr rise to a variety of new signalr processing applications for which securityr aspects can no longer be dealt withr by classical cryptographic methods. Ther classical security model is targetedr toward protecting the communication ofr two trusted parties against a potentiallyr malevolent third party. In such cases, it isr sufficient that secure cryptographicr primitives are applied on top of transmissionr and processing modules. In anr increasing number of applications, however,r the classical security model is nor longer adequate since one or multiple ofr the parties involved in the communication,r distribution, or processingr of the data may not be trusted. Forr example, a database server may not ber trusted, creating the need for methodsr that hide the content of query to ther database server, while still allowing ther query to be resolved. As another example,r we may consider a remote diagnosis service,r where a nontrusted party is taskedr with processing sensitive medical data. Inr such a scenario, we need methods andr technologies to carry out the task (medicalr diagnosis) without leaking the privater data of the patient (including the diagnosisr results).