Comments on "An Efficient Privacy-Preserving Outsourced Calculation Toolkit With Multiple Keys"

• Published in: IEEE transactions on information forensics and security Vol. 13; no. 10; pp. 2668 - 2669
• Main Authors: Li, Chen, Ma, Wenping
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-10-2018
• Subjects: Authorization; Cryptographic protocols; Data privacy; Data security; Encryption; homomorphic encryption; multiple keys; outsourced computation; Privacy-preserving; Public key
• ISSN: 1556-6013; 1556-6021
• DOI: 10.1109/TIFS.2018.2825143

Recently, Liu et al. proposed an efficient privacy-preserving outsourced calculation framework with multiple keys. The building blocks of this framework are a modified homomorphic encryption scheme and a basic interactive protocol for computing the sum of two encrypted dates across two domains. We found that there is a mistake in the parameter setting of their modified homomorphic encryption scheme and a security leak in the basic interactive computation protocol. This security leak enables an adversary to compromise the privacy of users, which are claimed to be protected. By our analysis, we suggest that the proposed framework, without any modification, should be avoided for use in privacy-preserving outsourced computation, and a similar scheme should be carefully designed in the future.