Optimizing Secure Statistical Computations with PICCO

Abstract: Growth in research collaboration has caused an increased need for sharing of data. However, when this data is private, there is also an increased need for maintaining security and privacy. Secure multi-party computation enables any function to be securely evaluated over private data without revealing any unintended data. A number of tools and compilers have been recently developed to support evaluation of various functionalities over private data. PICCO is one of such compilers that transforms a general-purpose user program into its secure distributed implementation. Here we assess performance of common statistical programs using PICCO. Specifically, we focus on chi-squared and standard deviation computations and optimize user programs for them to assess performance that an informed user might expect from securely evaluating these functions using a general-purpose compiler.