Encrypted Demand Projection Aggregation Without Data Sharing

A trusted aggregator acts as an intermediary that collects encrypted partial projections from multiple companies, combines them, and returns the combined forecast without any company exposing their plaintext data. The aggregator handles the combined encrypted data through homomorphic operations, enabling accurate forecasting while maintaining data privacy through the intermediary mechanism.

Companies create encrypted copies (partial projections) of their historical data that can be shared and combined without revealing the original plaintext information. These encrypted copies contain the necessary information for forecasting when aggregated, but cannot be reverse-engineered to extract individual company data, thus enabling forecasting accuracy while preserving data privacy.

The trusted aggregator serves as a mediator that only handles encrypted data throughout the process. It performs homomorphic addition on encrypted partial projections and returns encrypted combined results, never accessing plaintext data. This reduces security risks compared to traditional trusted third-party approaches because the aggregator cannot reverse-engineer individual company data from the encrypted combinations.

The patent replaces the mechanical system of trusted third-party data handling with cryptographic operations. Instead of relying on the trustworthiness of a third party to handle plaintext data securely, the system uses homomorphic encryption properties to perform computations on encrypted data, substituting cryptographic mechanisms for trust-based security models.