Homomorphic Benchmarking with Cascaded Decryption for Metric Confidentiality
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing benchmarking systems face challenges in preserving the confidentiality of proprietary performance metrics during aggregation, as they rely on a single trusted third party that can unintentionally or intentionally expose sensitive data.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a threshold homomorphic encryption scheme with cascaded decryption, where multiple parties contribute public keys for encryption, allowing aggregation of encrypted metrics without exposing the underlying data, and ensuring decryption requires collaboration among independent parties.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If a single trusted third party is used for benchmarking aggregation, then the aggregation process is simple and efficient, but the confidentiality of individual performance metrics is compromised
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the trusted third party into multiple independent decryption services, each holding a portion of the decryption key. The benchmarking aggregation service encrypts metrics with a public key, and multiple independent services must collaborate to decrypt the aggregated result, preventing any single service from accessing individual metrics while maintaining aggregation efficiency
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces homomorphic encryption as an intermediary mechanism that allows aggregation operations to be performed on encrypted data without decryption. The aggregation service can compute benchmarks over encrypted metrics, and only the final aggregated result is decrypted by multiple independent services, preserving confidentiality while enabling efficient aggregation
2Loss of information
If encryption is applied to performance metrics, then the confidentiality of data is preserved, but the ability to calculate benchmarks using the data is lost
Solution Approach 1:
The patent replaces the traditional mechanical approach of decrypting then aggregating with a cryptographic substitution where aggregation operations are performed directly on encrypted data using homomorphic properties. This allows benchmark calculations to be executed on ciphertexts, eliminating the need to expose plaintext metrics while maintaining full computational capability
Solution Approach 2:
The patent changes the state parameter of the performance metrics from plaintext to homomorphically encrypted ciphertext, enabling mathematical operations to be performed on the encrypted form. The homomorphic encryption scheme preserves the algebraic structure necessary for aggregation operations, allowing benchmarks to be calculated without changing the confidentiality state of the data
3Reliability
If multiple independent decryption services are introduced, then the security and confidentiality of metrics are improved, but the system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges the decryption functionality into a distributed architecture where multiple independent services share the decryption workload through threshold cryptography. Rather than creating separate complex systems, the decryption capability is combined across multiple services that collectively hold the private key, reducing individual service complexity while improving overall security
Solution Approach 2:
The patent designs the decryption services with multi-functionality, where each service can independently perform decryption operations on any encrypted benchmark data without requiring service-specific customization. This universal decryption capability reduces architectural complexity by using standardized protocols and key management across all decryption services
Data Source
AI summary
A benchmarking service is engineered to provide computing performance metric benchmarks based on computing performance metrics provided from a variety of providers without being exposed to the underlying computing performance metrics. A homomorphic encryption scheme is used in a threshold cryptography scenario that allows aggregation of the computing performance metrics without decrypting the metrics. An independent decryption service can partially decrypt the benchmark, which can ultimately be decrypted to plaintext for use by the provider. Bitwise operations can be defined to address error problems, and the bitwise operations can be constrained to a smaller bit size to avoid proliferation of gates.