Big Island, HI, USA
Jan. 6, 2003 to Jan. 9, 2003
Ioannis Ioannidis , Purdue University
Ananth Grama , Purdue University
The increase in volume and sensitivity of data communicated and processed over the Internet has been accompanied by a corresponding need for e-commerce techniques in which entities can participate in a secure and anonymous fashion. Even simple arithmetic operations over a set of integers partitioned over a network require sophisticated algorithms. As a part of our earlier work, we have developed a secure protocol for computing dot products of two vectors. In this paper,we present a secure protocol for Yao?s millionaires? problem. In this problem, each of the two participat-ing parties have a number and the objective is to determine whose number is larger without disclosing any information about the numbers. This problem has direct applications in on-line bidding and auctions. Furthermore, combined with a secure dot-product, a solution to this secure multi-party computation provides necessary building blocks for such basic operations as frequent item-set generation in association rule mining.<div></div> Although an asymptotically optimal solution for the secure multiparty computation of the ?less-or-equal? predicate exists in literature, this protocol is not suited for practical applications. Here, we present a protocol which has a much simpler structure and is more efficient for numbers in ranges practically encountered in typical e-commerce applications. Furthermore, advances in cryptanalysis and the subsequent increase in key lengths for public-key cryptographic systems accentuate the advantage of the proposed protocol. We present experimental evidence demonstrating the efficiency of the proposed protocol both in terms of time and communication overhead.
Ioannis Ioannidis, Ananth Grama, "An Efficient Protocol for Yao?s Millionaires? Problem", HICSS, 2003, 36th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, 36th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences 2003, pp. 205a, doi:10.1109/HICSS.2003.1174464