Author
Mikhail J. Atallah, K.N. Pantazopoulos, J.R. Rice, E.H. Spafford
Abstract
We investigate the outsourcing of numerical and scientific computations using the following framework: A customer who needs computations done but lacks the computational resources (computing power, appropriate software, or programming expertise) to do these locally, would like to use an external agent to perform these computations. This currently arises in many practical situations, including the financial services and petroleum services industries. The outsourcing is secure if it is done without revealing to the external agent either the actual data or the actual answer to the computations. THe general idea is for the customer to do some carefully designed local preprocessing (disguising) of the problem and/or data before sending it to the agent, and also some local postprocessing of the answer returned to extract the truse answer. The disguise process should be as lightweight as possible, e.g., take time proportional to the size of the input and answer. The disguise preprocessing that that the customer performs locally to "hide" the real computation can change the numerical properties of the computational performanc. We present a framewrok for disguising scientific copmutations and discuss their costs, numerical properties, and levels of security. These disguise techniques can be embedded in a very high level, easy-to-use system (problem solving environment) that hides their complexity.
