Role-based ecosystem for the design, development, and deployment of secure multi-party data analytics applications
Files
Accepted manuscript
Date
2019
Authors
Lapets, Andrei
Albab, Kinan Dak
Issa, Rawane
Qin, Lucy
Varia, Mayank
Bestavros, Azer
Jansen, Frederick
Version
Accepted manuscript
OA Version
Citation
Andrei Lapets, Kinan Dak Albab, Rawane Issa, Lucy Qin, Mayank Varia, Azer Bestavros, Frederick Jansen. 2019. "Role-Based Ecosystem for the Design, Development, and Deployment of Secure Multi-Party Data Analytics Applications." 2019 IEEE Cybersecurity Development (SecDev). https://doi.org/10.1109/SecDev.2019.00023
Abstract
Software applications that employ secure multi-party computation
(MPC) can empower individuals and organizations to
benefit from privacy-preserving data analyses when data sharing
is encumbered by confidentiality concerns, legal constraints,
or corporate policies. MPC is already being incorporated into
software solutions in some domains; however, individual use cases
do not fully convey the variety, extent, and complexity of the
opportunities of MPC. This position paper articulates a rolebased
perspective that can provide some insight into how future
research directions, infrastructure development and evaluation
approaches, and deployment practices for MPC may evolve.
Drawing on our own lessons from existing real-world deployments
and the fundamental characteristics of MPC that make
it a compelling technology, we propose a role-based conceptual
framework for describing MPC deployment scenarios. Our
framework acknowledges and leverages a novel assortment of
roles that emerge from the fundamental ways in which MPC protocols
support federation of functionalities and responsibilities.
Defining these roles using the new opportunities for federation
that MPC enables in turn can help identify and organize the
capabilities, concerns, incentives, and trade-offs that affect the
entities (software engineers, government regulators, corporate
executives, end-users, and others) that participate in an MPC
deployment scenario. This framework can not only guide the
development of an ecosystem of modular and composable MPC
tools, but can make explicit some of the opportunities that
researchers and software engineers (and any organizations they
form) have to differentiate and specialize the artifacts and services
they choose to design, develop, and deploy. We demonstrate how
this framework can be used to describe existing MPC deployment
scenarios, how new opportunities in a scenario can be observed
by disentangling roles inhabited by the involved parties, and how
this can motivate the development of MPC libraries and software
tools that specialize not by application domain but by role.