Computation on Encrypted Data using Dataflow Authentication
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Encrypting data before sending it to the cloud protects it against attackers, but requires the cloud to compute on encrypted data. Trusted modules, such as SGX enclaves, promise to provide a secure environment in which data can be decrypted and then processed. However, vulnerabilities in the executed program, which becomes part of the trusted code base (TCB), give attackers ample opportunity to execute arbitrary code inside the enclave. This code can modify the dataflow of the program and leak secrets via SGX side-channels. Since any larger code base is rife with vulnerabilities, it is not a good idea to outsource entire programs to SGX enclaves. A secure alternative relying solely on cryptography would be fully homomorphic encryption. However, due to its high computational complexity it is unlikely to be adopted in the near future. Researchers have made several proposals for transforming programs to perform encrypted computations on less powerful encryption schemes. Yet current approaches do not support programs making control-flow decisions based on encrypted data. We introduce the concept of dataflow authentication (DFAuth) to enable such programs. DFAuth prevents an adversary from arbitrarily deviating from the dataflow of a program. Our technique hence offers protections against the side-channel attacks described above. We implemented DFAuth using a novel authenticated homomorphic encryption scheme, a Java bytecode-tobytecode compiler producing fully executable programs, and an SGX enclave running a small and program-independent TCB. We applied DFAuth to an existing neural network that performs machine learning on sensitive medical data. The transformation yields a neural network with encrypted weights, which can be evaluated on encrypted inputs in 0.86 s.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it