206 research outputs found
Web-based multi-party computation with application to anonymous aggregate compensation analytics
We describe the definition, design, implementation, and deployment of a multi-party computation protocol and supporting web-based infrastructure. The protocol and infrastructure constitute a software application that allows groups of cooperating parties, such as companies or other organizations, to collect aggregate data for statistical analysis without revealing the data of individual participants. The application was developed specifically to support a Boston Women's Workforce Council (BWWC) study of the gender wage gap among employers within the Greater Boston Area. The application was deployed successfully to collect aggregate statistical data pertaining to compensation levels across genders and demographics at a number of participating organizations.We would like to acknowledge all the members of the Boston Women's Workforce Council (BWWC), and to thank in particular Christina M. Knowles and Katie A. Johnston, who led the effort to organize participants and deploy the protocol as part of the 100% Talent: The Boston Women's Compact effort [1, 2]. We would also like to acknowledge the Boston University Initiative on Cities, and in particular Executive Director Katherine Lusk, who brought this potential application of secure multi-party computation to our attention. Both the BWWC and the Initiative on Cities contributed funding to complete this work. We would also like to acknowledge the Hariri Institute at Boston University for contributing research and software development resources. Support was also provided in part by Smart-city Cloud-based Open Platform and Ecosystem (SCOPE), an NSF Division of Industrial Innovation and Partnerships PFI:BIC project under award #1430145, and by Modular Approach to Cloud Security (MACS), an NSF CISE CNS SaTC Frontier project under award #1414119
Secure multi-party computation for analytics deployed as a lightweight web application
We describe the definition, design, implementation, and deployment of a secure multi-party computation protocol and web application. The protocol and application allow groups of cooperating parties with minimal expertise and no specialized resources to compute basic statistical analytics on their collective data sets without revealing the contributions of individual participants. The application was developed specifically to support a Boston Women’s Workforce Council (BWWC) study of wage disparities within employer organizations in the Greater Boston Area. The application has been deployed successfully to support two data collection sessions (in 2015 and in 2016) to obtain data pertaining to compensation levels across genders and demographics. Our experience provides insights into the particular security and usability requirements (and tradeoffs) a successful “MPC-as-a-service” platform design and implementation must negotiate.We would like to acknowledge all the members of the Boston Women’s Workforce Council, and to thank in particular MaryRose Mazzola, Christina M. Knowles, and Katie A. Johnston, who led the efforts to organize participants and deploy the protocol as part of the 100% Talent: The Boston Women’s Compact [31], [32] data collections. We also thank the Boston University Initiative on Cities (IOC), and in particular Executive Director Katherine Lusk, who brought this potential application of secure multi-party computation to our attention. The BWWC, the IOC, and several sponsors contributed funding to complete this work. Support was also provided in part by Smart-city Cloud-based Open Platform and Ecosystem (SCOPE), an NSF Division of Industrial Innovation and Partnerships PFI:BIC project under award #1430145, and by Modular Approach to Cloud Security (MACS), an NSF CISE CNS SaTC Frontier project under award #1414119
Web-Based Employee Performance Assessment Application with SMART Method: An Agile Approach in the Context of the Smartphone Market
Employee performance is essential in determining the company's sustainability, so company leaders must pay attention to employee performance. Many subjective factors determine employee performance, so performance evaluations are sometimes unfair. One of the companies developing in Indonesia is a smartphone sales company, CV Jala Kencana. As the company develops and the number of employees increases, problems arise in assessing employee performance that have yet to be measurable. So that employee performance assessments can be more objective, a decision support system application is needed that can help assess employee performance. The Agile SDLC method is used in designing website-based employee performance assessment applications. Then, for the employee performance assessment feature, the Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique (SMART) method is used, and SHA512 encryption is applied to the employee performance assessment database, which cannot be manipulated. This research produces a web-based employee performance assessment application with features to assess employee performance objectively based on predetermined criteria.Employee performance plays a significant role in determining the company's sustainability, so company leaders must pay attention to employee performance. To determine an employee's performance more objectively, many subjective factors influence it, so performance appraisals only sometimes end up being fair. One of the companies developing in Indonesia is a smartphone sales company, CV Jala Kencana. As the CV Jala Kencana company continues to develop and the number of employees increases, problems arise in assessing employee performance, which still needs to be done objectively. So that employee performance assessments can be more objective, a decision support systems application is needed that can help assess employee performance. The Agile SDLC method is used in designing a website-based employee performance assessment application. Then, for the employee performance assessment feature, the Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique (SMART) method is used, and SHA512 encryption is implemented in the Database Management Systems for better database security. This research produces a web-based employee performance assessment application with features for assessing employee performance based on predetermined criteria
From usability to secure computing and back again
Secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows multiple parties
to jointly compute the output of a function while preserving
the privacy of any individual party’s inputs to that function.
As MPC protocols transition from research prototypes to realworld
applications, the usability of MPC-enabled applications
is increasingly critical to their successful deployment and
widespread adoption. Our Web-MPC platform, designed with
a focus on usability, has been deployed for privacy-preserving
data aggregation initiatives with the City of Boston and the
Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. After building and
deploying an initial version of the platform, we conducted a
heuristic evaluation to identify usability improvements and
implemented corresponding application enhancements. However,
it is difficult to gauge the effectiveness of these changes
within the context of real-world deployments using traditional
web analytics tools without compromising the security guarantees
of the platform. This work consists of two contributions
that address this challenge: (1) the Web-MPC platform has
been extended with the capability to collect web analytics
using existing MPC protocols, and (2) as a test of this feature
and a way to inform future work, this capability has been
leveraged to conduct a usability study comparing the two versions
ofWeb-MPC. While many efforts have focused on ways
to enhance the usability of privacy-preserving technologies,
this study serves as a model for using a privacy-preserving
data-driven approach to evaluate and enhance the usability of
privacy-preserving websites and applications deployed in realworld
scenarios. Data collected in this study yields insights
into the relationship between usability and security; these can
help inform future implementations of MPC solutions.Published versio
An Embedded Domain-Specific Language for Logical Circuit Descriptions with Applications to Garbled Circuits
Contemporary libraries and frameworks that make it possible to incorporate secure multi-party computation protocols and capabilities into production software systems and applications must sometimes deliver underlying capabilities (such as logical circuit synthesis) to new kinds of environments (such as web browsers or serverless cloud computing platforms). In order to illustrate some of the benefits of addressing this challenge by building a solution from the ground up that leverages the features of a contemporary and widely used programming language, we present an embedded domain-specific language that allows programmers to describe and synthesize logical circuits. Notably, this approach allows programmers to employ many of the language features and any of the programming paradigms supported by the host language. We illustrate this flexibility by considering two use cases: synthesizing circuits for relational operations and synthesizing circuits corresponding to the SHA-256 cryptographic hash function
Asynchronous Delegated Private Set Intersection with Hiding of Intersection Size
Integrating private set intersection (PSI) protocols within real-world data workflows, software applications, or web services can be challenging. This can occur because data contributors and result recipients do not have the technical expertise, information technology infrastructure, or other resources to participate throughout the execution of a protocol and/or to incur all the communication costs associated with participation. Furthermore, contemporary workflows, applications, and services are often designed around RESTful APIs that might not require contributors or recipients to remain online or to maintain state. Asynchronous delegated PSI protocol variants can better match the expectations of software engineers by (1) allowing data contributors to contribute their inputs and then to depart permanently, and (2) allowing result recipients to request their result only once they are ready to do so. However, such protocols usually accomplish this by introducing an additional party that learns some information about the size of the intersection. This work presents an asynchronous delegated PSI protocol variant that does not reveal the intersection size to the additional party. It is shown that such a protocol can have, on average, linear time and space complexity
Towards a theory of shopping: a preliminary conceptual framework
One criticism (Arnould, 2000) of Miller's 1998 book, A Theory of Shopping and the jointly authored Shopping, Place and Identity (Miller et al., 1998) is that the authors fail to incorporate or even acknowledge the body of literature which exists within marketing and consumer research. Thus, as Arnould states, `the authors rediscover some of the findings of theoretical marketing literature about shopping venues, shopping and customer- store and service relationships' (Arnould, 2000, p. 106). This paper attempts to redress the balance by proposing a conceptual framework for shopping which incorporates relevant marketing and consumer research literature and which also draws on the wider literature in the social sciences to set the context for progress towards a theory of shopping
Accessible privacy-preserving web-based data analysis for assessing and addressing economic inequalities
An essential component of initiatives that aim to address pervasive inequalities of any kind is the ability to collect empirical evidence of both the status quo baseline and of any improvement that can be attributed to prescribed and deployed interventions. Unfortunately, two substantial barriers can arise preventing the collection and analysis of such empirical evidence: (1) the sensitive nature of the data itself and (2) a lack of technical sophistication and infrastructure available to both an initiative's beneficiaries and to those spearheading it. In the last few years, it has been shown that a cryptographic primitive called secure multi-party computation (MPC) can provide a natural technological resolution to this conundrum. MPC allows an otherwise disinterested third party to contribute its technical expertise and resources, to avoid incurring any additional liabilities itself, and (counterintuitively) to reduce the level of data exposure that existing parties must accept to achieve their data analysis goals. However, achieving these benefits requires the deliberate design of MPC tools and frameworks whose level of accessibility to non-technical users with limited infrastructure and expertise is state-of-the-art. We describe our own experiences designing, implementing, and deploying such usable web applications for secure data analysis within the context of two real-world initiatives that focus on promoting economic equality.Published versio
Mutations in POLE and survival of colorectal cancer patients – link to disease stage and treatment
Recent molecular profiling studies reported a new class of ultramutated
colorectal cancers (CRCs), which are caused by exonuclease domain mutations
(EDMs) in DNA polymerase ϵ (POLE). Data on the clinical implications of these
findings as to whether these mutations define a unique CRC entity with
distinct clinical outcome are lacking. We performed Sanger sequencing of the
POLE exonuclease domain in 431 well-characterized patients with microsatellite
stable (MSS) CRCs of a population-based patient cohort. Mutation data were
analyzed for associations with major epidemiological, clinical, genetic, and
pathological parameters including overall survival (OS) and disease-specific
survival (DSS). In 373 of 431 MSS CRC, all exons of the exonuclease domain
were analyzable. Fifty-four mutations were identified in 46 of these samples
(12.3%). Besides already reported EDMs, we detected many new mutations in
exons 13 and 14 (corresponding to amino acids 410–491) as well as in exon 9
and exon 11 (corresponding to aa 268–303 and aa 341–369). However, we did not
see any significant associations of EDMs with clinicopathological parameters,
including sex, age, tumor location and tumor stage, CIMP, KRAS, and BRAF
mutations. While with a median follow-up time of 5.0 years, survival analysis
of the whole cohort revealed nonsignificantly different adjusted hazard ratios
(HRs) of 1.35 (95% CI: 0.82–2.25) and 1.44 (0.81–2.58) for OS and DSS
indicating slightly impaired survival of patients with EDMs, subgroup analysis
for patients with stage III/IV disease receiving chemotherapy revealed a
statistically significantly increased adjusted HR (1.87; 95%CI: 1.02–3.44). In
conclusion, POLE EDMs do not appear to define an entirely new clinically
distinct disease entity in CRC but may have prognostic or predictive
implications in CRC subgroups, whose significance remains to be investigated
in future studies
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Plant water potential improves prediction of empirical stomatal models
Climate change is expected to lead to increases in drought frequency and severity, with deleterious effects on many ecosystems. Stomatal responses to changing environmental conditions form the backbone of all ecosystem models, but are based on empirical relationships and are not well-tested during drought conditions. Here, we use a dataset of 34 woody plant species spanning global forest biomes to examine the effect of leaf water potential on stomatal conductance and test the predictive accuracy of three major stomatal models and a recently proposed model. We find that current leaf-level empirical models have consistent biases of over-prediction of stomatal conductance during dry conditions, particularly at low soil water potentials. Furthermore, the recently proposed stomatal conductance model yields increases in predictive capability compared to current models, and with particular improvement during drought conditions. Our results reveal that including stomatal sensitivity to declining water potential and consequent impairment of plant water transport will improve predictions during drought conditions and show that many biomes contain a diversity of plant stomatal strategies that range from risky to conservative stomatal regulation during water stress. Such improvements in stomatal simulation are greatly needed to help unravel and predict the response of ecosystems to future climate extremes.Funding for this research was provided by NSF DEB EF-1340270 and the Climate Mitigation Initiative at the Princeton Environmental Institute, Princeton University. SL acknowledges financial support from the China Scholarship Council (CSC). VRD acknowledges funding from RamĂłn y Cajal fellowship (RYC-2012-10970). BTW was supported by the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments-Tropics, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research. DJC acknowledges funding from the National Science Centre, Poland (NN309 713340). WRLA was supported in part by NSF DEB 1714972
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