Enabling analytics on sensitive medical data with secure multi-party computation

While there is a clear need to apply data analytics in the healthcare sector, this is often difficult because it requires combining sensitive data from multiple data sources. In this paper, we show how the cryptographic technique of secure multiparty computation can enable such data analytics by performing analytics without the need to share the underlying data. We discuss the issue of compliance to European privacy legislation; report on three pilots bringing these techniques closer to practice; and discuss the main challenges ahead to make fully privacy-preserving data analytics in the medical sector commonplace

Secure distributed key generation in attribute based encryption systems

\u3cp\u3eNowadays usage of cloud computing is increasing in popularity and this raises new data protection challenges. In such distributed systems it is unrealistic to assume that the servers are fully trusted in enforcing the access policies. Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) is one of the solutions proposed to tackle these trust problems. In ABE the data is encrypted using the access policy and authorized users can decrypt the data only using a secret key that is associated with their attributes. The secret key is generated by a Key Generation Authority (KGA), which in small systems can be constantly audited, therefore fully trusted. In contrast, in large and distrusted systems, trusting the KGAs is questionable. This paper presents a solution which increases the trust in ABE KGAs. The solution uses several KGAs which issue secret keys only for a limited number of users. One KGA issues a secret key associated with user's attributes and the other authorities issue independently secret keys associated with generalized values of user's attributes. Decryption is possible only if the secret keys associated with the non-generalized and generalized attributes are consistent. This mitigates the risk of unauthorized data disclosure when a couple of authorities are compromised.\u3c/p\u3