Paper 2022/829

TERSE: Tiny Encryptions and Really Speedy Execution for Post-Quantum Private Stream Aggregation

Abstract

The massive scale and performance demands of privacy-preserving data aggregation make integration of security and privacy difficult. Traditional tools in private computing are not well-suited to handle these challenges, especially for more limited client devices. Efficient primitives and protocols for secure and private data aggregation are a promising approach for private data analytics with resource-constrained devices. However, even such efficient primitives may be much slower than computation with plain data (i.e., without security/privacy guarantees). In this paper, we present TERSE, a new Private Stream Aggregation (PSA) protocol for quantum-secure time-series additive data aggregation. Due to its simplicity, low latency, and low communication overhead, TERSE is uniquely well-suited for real-world deployment. In our implementation, TERSE shows very low latency for both clients and servers, achieving encryption latency on a smartphone of 0.0003 ms and aggregation latency of 0.006 ms for 1000 users. TERSE also shows significant improvements in latency over other state-of-the-art quantum-secure PSA, achieving improvements of 1796x to 12406x for encryption at the client's end and 848x to 5433x for aggregation and decryption at the server's end.