International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 20 February 2023

Joakim Brorsson, Martin Gunnarsson
ePrint Report ePrint Report
Private Stream Aggregation (PSA) schemes are efficient protocols for distributed data analytics. In a PSA scheme, a set of data producers can encrypt data for a central party so that it learns the sum of all (encrypted) values, but nothing about each individual value. Due to this ability to efficiently enable central data analytics without leaking individual user data, PSA schemes are often used for IoT data analytics scenarios where privacy is important, such as smart metering. However, all known PSA schemes require a trusted party for key generation, which is undesirable from a privacy standpoint. Further, even though the main benefit of PSA schemes over alternative technologies such as Functional Encryption is that they are efficient enough to run on IoT devices, there exists no evaluation of the efficiency of existing PSA schemes on realistic IoT devices.

In this paper, we address both these issues. We first evaluate the efficiency of the state of the art PSA schemes on realistic IoT devices. We then propose, implement and evaluate a DIstributed setup PSA scheme for Use in Constrained Environments (DIPSAUCE). DIPSAUCE is the first PSA scheme that does not rely on a trusted party. Our security and efficiency evaluation shows that it is indeed possible to construct an efficient PSA scheme without a trusted central party. Surprisingly, our results also show that, a side effect, our method for distributing the setup procedure also makes the encryption procedure more efficient than the state of the art PSA schemes which rely on trusted parties.
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