Approximate Two-Party Privacy-Preserving String Matching with Linear Complexity

Consider two parties who want to compare their strings, e.g., genomes, but do not want to reveal them to each other. We present a system for privacy-preserving matching of strings, which differs from existing systems by providing a deterministic approximation instead of an exact distance. It is efficient (linear complexity), non-interactive and does not involve a third party which makes it particularly suitable for cloud computing. We extend our protocol, such that it mitigates iterated differential attacks proposed by Goodrich. Further an implementation of the system is evaluated and compared against current privacy-preserving string matching algorithms.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Some notes on how to catch a red herring Ageing, time-to-death & care costs for older people in Sweden

In this paper we test the 'red herring' hypothesis for expenditures on long-term care. The main contribution of this paper is that we assess the 'red herring' hypothesis using an aggregated measure that allows us to control for entering the final period of life on the individual level. In addition we implement a model that allows for age specific time-to-death (TTD) effects on Long Term Care. We also account for the problem that mortality, and therefore TTD, are themselves influenced by care expenditure. For our analysis we use administrative data from the Swedish statistical office. In contrast to many previous empirical studies, we are able to use the entire population for estimation instead of a sample. Our identification strategy is based on fixed effects estimation and the instrumental variable approach to achieve exogenous variation in TTD. Our results indicate that although time-to-death is a relevant indicator for long term care, age itself seems to be much more important for the projection of long-term care expenditure.