XYZ Privacy

Future autonomous vehicles will generate, collect, aggregate and consume significant volumes of data as key gateway devices in emerging Internet of Things scenarios. While vehicles are widely accepted as one of the most challenging mobility contexts in which to achieve effective data communications, less attention has been paid to the privacy of data emerging from these vehicles. The quality and usability of such privatized data will lie at the heart of future safe and efficient transportation solutions. In this paper, we present the XYZ Privacy mechanism. XYZ Privacy is to our knowledge the first such mechanism that enables data creators to submit multiple contradictory responses to a query, whilst preserving utility measured as the absolute error from the actual original data. The functionalities are achieved in both a scalable and secure fashion. For instance, individual location data can be obfuscated while preserving utility, thereby enabling the scheme to transparently integrate with existing systems (e.g. Waze). A new cryptographic primitive Function Secret Sharing is used to achieve non-attributable writes and we show an order of magnitude improvement from the default implementation.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1708.0188

Attribute-Based Fully Homomorphic Encryption with a Bounded Number of Inputs

The only known way to achieve Attribute-based Fully Homomorphic Encryption (ABFHE) is through indistinguishability obfsucation. The best we can do at the moment without obfuscation is Attribute-Based Leveled FHE which allows circuits of an a priori bounded depth to be evaluated. This has been achieved from the Learning with Errors (LWE) assumption. However we know of no other way without obfuscation of constructing a scheme that can evaluate circuits of unbounded depth. In this paper, we present an ABFHE scheme that can evaluate circuits of unbounded depth but with one limitation: there is a bound N on the number of inputs that can be used in a circuit evaluation. The bound N could be thought of as a bound on the number of independent senders. Our scheme allows N to be exponentially large so we can set the parameters so that there is no limitation on the number of inputs in practice. Our construction relies on multi-key FHE and leveled ABFHE, both of which have been realized from LWE, and therefore we obtain a concrete scheme that is secure under LWE

Policy-Based Non-interactive Outsourcing of Computation using multikey FHE and CP-ABE

We consider the problem of outsourced computation that operates on encrypted inputs supplied by multiple independent parties. To facilitate fine-grained access control, it would be desirable if each party could encrypt her input under an appropriate access policy. Moreover, a party should only be authorized to decrypt the result of a computation performed on a set of encrypted inputs if his credentials satisfy the composition of all input policies. There has been limited success so far achieving homomorphic encryption in the functional setting; that is, for primitives such as Ciphertext-Policy Attribute Based Encryption (CP-ABE) and Identity Based Encryption (IBE). We introduce a new primitive that captures homomorphic encryption with support for access policies and policy composition. We then present a generic construction using CP-ABE and multikey Fully-Homomorphic encryption (FHE). Furthermore, we show that a CP-ABE scheme that is homomorphic for circuits of polylogarithmic depth in some parameter $m$ implies a CP-ABE scheme that is homomorphic for circuits of arity $m$ and unbounded depth

A Note on Attribute-Based Group Homomorphic Encryption

Group Homomorphic Encryption (GHE), formally defined by Armknecht, Katzenbeisser and Peter, is a public-key encryption primitive where the decryption algorithm is a group homomorphism. Hence it supports homomorphic evaluation of a single algebraic operation such as modular addition or modular multiplication. Most classical homomorphic encryption schemes such as as Goldwasser-Micali and Paillier are instances of GHE. In this work, we extend GHE to the attribute-based setting. We introduce and formally define the notion of Attribute-Based GHE (ABGHE) and explore its properties. We then examine the algebraic structure on attributes induced by the group operation in an ABGHE. This algebraic stricture is a bounded semilattice. We consider some possible semilattices and how they can be realized by an ABGHE supporting inner product predicates. We then examine existing schemes from the literature and show that they meet our definition of ABGHE for either an additive or multiplicative homomorphism. Some of these schemes are in fact Identity-Based Group Homomorphic Encryption (IBGHE) schemes i.e. instances of ABGHE whose class of access policies are point functions. We then present a possibility result for IBGHE from indistinguishability obfuscation for any group for which a (public-key) GHE scheme exists

Breast cancer management pathways during the COVID-19 pandemic: outcomes from the UK ‘Alert Level 4’ phase of the B-MaP-C study

Abstract: Background: The B-MaP-C study aimed to determine alterations to breast cancer (BC) management during the peak transmission period of the UK COVID-19 pandemic and the potential impact of these treatment decisions. Methods: This was a national cohort study of patients with early BC undergoing multidisciplinary team (MDT)-guided treatment recommendations during the pandemic, designated ‘standard’ or ‘COVID-altered’, in the preoperative, operative and post-operative setting. Findings: Of 3776 patients (from 64 UK units) in the study, 2246 (59%) had ‘COVID-altered’ management. ‘Bridging’ endocrine therapy was used (n = 951) where theatre capacity was reduced. There was increasing access to COVID-19 low-risk theatres during the study period (59%). In line with national guidance, immediate breast reconstruction was avoided (n = 299). Where adjuvant chemotherapy was omitted (n = 81), the median benefit was only 3% (IQR 2–9%) using ‘NHS Predict’. There was the rapid adoption of new evidence-based hypofractionated radiotherapy (n = 781, from 46 units). Only 14 patients (1%) tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 during their treatment journey. Conclusions: The majority of ‘COVID-altered’ management decisions were largely in line with pre-COVID evidence-based guidelines, implying that breast cancer survival outcomes are unlikely to be negatively impacted by the pandemic. However, in this study, the potential impact of delays to BC presentation or diagnosis remains unknown

WUWNet 2016

This paper describes the ongoing evolution of the Water-Com framework developed as part of the NSF funded Ocean-TUNE CRI project. A particular challenge for connecting global researchers and the public with remote, autonomous underwater research infrastructures is that translating and bringing the requesters topology and system properties into physical existence through dynamic reconfigurability of the deployed experimental infrastructure and assets. Previous work described the overall WaterCom framework, system architecture and design. The extension of this system to enable graphical node topology definition and validation, and the procedure for defining, scheduling and deploying experimental configurations on remote hardware is articulated