Paper 2021/1370

Masquerade: Verifiable Multi-Party Aggregation with Secure Multiplicative Commitments

Dimitris Mouris, University of Delaware
Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos, University of Delaware
Abstract

In crowd-sourced data aggregation over the Internet, participants share their data points with curators. However, a lack of strong privacy guarantees may discourage participation, which motivates the need for privacy-preserving aggregation protocols. Moreover, existing solutions remain limited with respect to public auditing without revealing the participants' data. In realistic applications, however, there is an increasing need for public verifiability (i.e., verifying the protocol correctness) while preserving the privacy of the participants' inputs, since the participants do not always trust the data curators. At the same time, while publicly distributed ledgers may provide public auditing, these schemes are not designed to protect sensitive information. In this work, we introduce two protocols, dubbed Masquerade and zk-Masquerade, for computing private statistics, such as sum, average, and histograms, without revealing anything about participants' data. We propose a tailored multiplicative commitment scheme to ensure the integrity of data aggregations and publish all the participants' commitments on a ledger to provide public verifiability. zk-Masquerade detects malicious participants who attempt to poison the aggregation results by adopting two zero-knowledge proof protocols that ensure the validity of shared data points before being aggregated and enable a broad range of numerical and categorical studies. In our experiments, we use homomorphic ciphertexts and commitments for a variable number of participants and evaluate the runtime and the communication cost of our protocols.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Published elsewhere. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology
DOI
10.1145/3705315
Keywords
Homomorphic CommitmentHomomorphic EncryptionPublic VerifiabilityPrivate Aggregation
Contact author(s)
tsoutsos @ udel edu
History
2025-02-16: last of 2 revisions
2021-10-12: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2021/1370
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2021/1370,
      author = {Dimitris Mouris and Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos},
      title = {Masquerade: Verifiable Multi-Party Aggregation with Secure Multiplicative Commitments},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2021/1370},
      year = {2021},
      doi = {10.1145/3705315},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1370}
}
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