Privacy-enhancing data aggregation and data analytics in wireless networks for a large class of distributed queries

Abstract

Privacy-enhancing techniques and protocols for data aggregation and analytics in wireless networks require the development of novel methods for efficient and privacy-preserving computation of distributed queries with the protection of outcomes from active attackers. Previous approaches to secure privacy-preserving computation of distributed queries incur significant communication overhead and cannot be applied to big data. This paper proposes two solutions to the problem of efficient and privacy-preserving computation of distributed queries with the protection of outcomes from active outsider attackers for a new large class of distributed statistical or numerical queries. This class contains many useful statistics and is larger than other classes considered in the literature previously. We propose two protocols for the Protection of data from Active Attackers (PAA) in the case of distributed privacy-preserving computation: PAA applying Shamir’s Secret Sharing (PAA-SSS) and PAA applying homomorphic encryption (PAA-HE). The PAA-HE protocol combines the use of ElGamal and Paillier encryption schemes in one system. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that both protocols outperform alternative approaches. PAA-HE provides stronger protection and is more efficient than PAA-SSS.