Paper 2025/1587

Secure Agents

Abstract

Organizations increasingly need to pool their sensitive data for collaborative computation while keeping their own data private from each other. One approach is to use a family of cryptographic protocols called Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC). Another option is to use a set of cloud services called clean rooms. Unfortunately, neither approach is satisfactory. MPC is orders of magnitude more resource-intensive than regular computation, making it impractical for workloads like data analytics and AI. Clean rooms do not give users the flexibility to perform arbitrary computations. We propose and develop an approach and system called a secure agent and utilize it to create a virtual clean room, Flexroom, that is both performant and flexible. Secure agents enable parties to create a phantom identity that they can collectively control, using maliciously secure MPC, which issues API calls to external services with parameters that remain secret from all participating parties. Importantly, in Flexroom, the secure agent uses MPC not to perform the computation itself, but instead merely to orchestrate the computation in the cloud, acting as a distinct trusted entity jointly governed by all parties. As a result, Flexroom enables collaborative computation with unfettered flexibility, including the ability to use convenient cloud services. By design, the collaborative computation runs at plaintext speeds, so the overhead of Flexroom will be amortized over a long computation.