The general model of secure computation system

Abstract

The paper considers the problem of organization the computations over encrypted data. This problem has become increasingly important due to the expansion of the cloud computing and the need for suitable measures to protect it. Different primitives were proposed to solve the problem in a limited context, such as garbled circuits, fully homomorphic encryption, functional encryption, secure multiparty computations and so on. However, the development of real secure computing system requires some general theory for organization of secure computing, using a systemic approach. We propose to divide all the functionality that the secure computing system must support into the several layers; the interaction between them would be done through the interfaces. Presented six-layer analytical model under the title Secure computing interface stack (SCIS) is intended to standardize and facilitate the work of researchers and developers in the field of cryptographically secure computing, i.e. such systems in which the untrusted parties process the sensitive data in encrypted form without decrypting at the any stage of processing. For each layer we outline the problems researchers deal with, reveal a range of issues that must be addressed, and provide a brief overview of the relative works. We survey and compare known secure computation systems analyzing them within our model and derive some new ideas for improvements of existing CSCS.