Threshold Secret Sharing for Privacy-Preserving Analytics
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current analytics systems face challenges in determining aggregated information about user interactions with content while maintaining the privacy of personally identifiable information (PII), as they often require access to user-specific data, which can lead to exposure of PII.
Innovation Solution
The implementation involves a method where client devices receive a public key, encrypt data using it, engage in an oblivious pseudorandom function protocol, and generate an encrypted secret share using a threshold secret sharing function, allowing decryption only when a threshold number of shares are received, ensuring PII is not revealed during data correlation.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If analytics systems access user-specific data to determine aggregated information about user interactions, then measurement precision is improved, but personally identifiable information privacy is compromised
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments user data into encrypted shares distributed across multiple storage locations. Each share alone is insufficient to reconstruct user identity, but collectively they enable accurate analytics. This segmentation allows the system to maintain measurement precision while preventing PII exposure by ensuring no single point contains identifiable information.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces cryptographic intermediaries (encryption schemes, hash functions, and secret sharing protocols) that mediate between user data and analytics processing. These intermediaries transform raw user-specific data into processed forms that preserve analytical value while eliminating identifiable characteristics, thus resolving the contradiction between measurement accuracy and privacy protection.
2Object-affected harmful factors
If threshold secret sharing is implemented to protect privacy, then PII privacy is improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary encryption and secret sharing operations during data collection and storage phases. By pre-processing data into encrypted shares before analytics operations, the system establishes privacy protections in advance, reducing the need for complex real-time privacy management during query execution while maintaining strong PII protection.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements self-service cryptographic mechanisms where the system automatically manages key generation, share distribution, and reconstruction processes without requiring manual intervention. This automation reduces operational complexity despite the sophisticated cryptographic protocols, making threshold secret sharing practical for production environments.
Data Source
AI summary
A method including at each of a number of client devices receiving a data item, receiving a public key from a second computing system, encrypting the data item using the public key to produce a singly encrypted data item, engaging in an oblivious pseudorandom function protocol with a first computing system using the singly encrypted data item to produce a seed, generating an encrypted secret share using a threshold secret sharing function under which the encrypted secret share cannot be decrypted until a threshold number of encrypted secret shares associated with the same singly encrypted data item are received, and transmitting the encrypted secret share to the first computing system and at the first computing system receiving a number of encrypted secret shares from the number of client devices, processing the number of encrypted secret shares to produce processed data, and transmitting the processed data to a second computing system.