Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

Secure Distortion Computation Among Untrusting Parties Using Homomorphic Encryption

Citation:   Rane, S.; Sun, W.; Vetro, A., "Secure Distortion Computation Between Untrusting Parties Using Homomorphic Encryption", IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Paper MA.L4.1, November 2009 (ICIP 2009)
MERL Report:  TR2009-070

Alice and Bob possess sequences xn and yn respectively and would like to compute d(xn,yn) where d(.,.) is a distortion measure. However, Alice and Bob do not trust each other and do not wish to reveal their data to each other. This paper describes and analyzes a protocol that uses homomorphic encryption for secure calculation of some special distortion functions without revealing xn and yn. The resulting distortion result is also in encrypted form. Two variants of the protocol are presented, one for the Hamming distance between binary vectors, and other for squared errors distortion between integer vectors. An application of the protocol for private biometric authentication is described in which Bob interacts with a remote encrypted fingerprint database (Alice) to achieve access control without revealing his own identity.

 Read the full technical report (PDF: 239 kB)