Page 45 - Federal Computer Week, July 2019

Feature Story
county to share it, said David Archer, Galois’ principal scientist for cryptog- raphy and multiparty computation.
The project involved two steps, starting with the secure multiparty computation. “You can think of that as a software-based technology where we can compute on data in such a way that it’s never revealed even to the com- puter that’s doing the work, but we can still do computations on it,” Archer said. In other words, it’s “computing where all the data stays encrypted.”
For the trusted execution environ- ment, Galois used processors that hide data while it’s being worked on. “Think of it as wrapping a black box around the data so that nothing in the system can look inside the black box except the code inside doing the computa- tion,” Archer said.
Researchers tested the technologies to see how they performed and how they compared to more traditional
methods, he added. “We ran several different queries that involved bring- ing those datasets together and asking questions that involved multiple data- sets at once,” Archer said. For exam- ple, they asked what proportion of people who were jailed or homeless in a certain time period had also used county mental health services.
In all the experiments, Archer said the team received the same answers that they received when they asked the questions without the two technolo- gies. “What that shows is that comput- ing on encrypted data with these tech- nologies does not affect the accuracy of the results at all,” he added.
Further tests and legislation
In the hardware-enabled trusted execu- tion environment, the time to answer the queries was low — a fraction of a second, or about as fast as a typical database query.
The multiparty computation ran slower, which Archer said he expect- ed to happen. Those tests took 10,000 times longer than the ones that involved the trusted execution envi- ronment. “There’s a clear trade-off here about timeliness of the data ana- lytics, the cost of building the system and what you get as a practical but also privacy-protected result,” Hart said.
Timeliness could be an issue, said Erin Dalton, deputy director of Allegh- eny County’s Office of Analytics, Tech- nology and Planning. “If we need to be displaying these data very quick- ly for decision-making, then I think these technologies might have a way to go,” she said. “But if not — if these are things that could run overnight or something like that — then I think they
hold great promise for the integration of data.”
The next steps for multiparty com- putation are emerging, Hart said, and several federal agencies have expressed interest in conducting their own pilot tests. “We need more dem- onstration projects of the technology using different types of data in differ- ent contexts” to learn the best ways to deploy the approach and ensure that data is protected, he added.
Meanwhile, several members of Congress are pushing for legislation that would support use of the technol- ogy in specific policy areas. Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) and a biparti- san group in the House introduced bills in November 2018 that would encour- age the use of multiparty computation for analyses that would help prospec- tive college students understand the costs and expected outcomes of gradu- ating from a specific university with a specific major.
Last July, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) introduced legislation to create a pilot program at the National Institutes of Health that would use multiparty computation at hospitals for research into vaccines and treat- ments for infections caused by soil- borne fungi.
More broadly, Dalton said she sees potential applications in international activities such as sharing information between the United States and Russia. “We’re always looking, just like every- body else, to enhance our security and make sure we keep up to speed on the latest technologies,” she said, so that as they become available, her agency can adopt them. n
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