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Universität Passau

Multiparty Protocols for Tree Classifiers

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Cryptography is the scientific study of techniques for securing information and communication against adversaries. It is about designing and analyzing encryption schemes and protocols that protect data from unauthorized reading. However, in our modern information-driven society with highly complex and interconnected information systems, encryption alone is no longer enough as it makes the data unintelligible, preventing any meaningful computation without decryption. On the one hand, data owners want to maintain control over their sensitive data. On the other hand, there is a high business incentive for collaborating with an untrusted external party. Modern cryptography encompasses different techniques, such as secure multiparty computation, homomorphic encryption or order-preserving encryption, that enable cloud users to encrypt their data before outsourcing it to the cloud while still being able to process and search on the outsourced and encrypted data without decrypting it. In this thesis, we rely on these cryptographic techniques for computing on encrypted data to propose efficient multiparty protocols for order-preserving encryption, decision tree evaluation and kth-ranked element computation. We start with Order-preserving encryption (OPE) which allows encrypting data, while still enabling efficient range queries on the encrypted data. However, OPE is symmetric limiting, the use case to one client and one server. Imagine a scenario where a Data Owner (DO) outsources encrypted data to the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) and a Data Analyst (DA) wants to execute private range queries on this data. Then either the DO must reveal its encryption key or the DA must reveal the private queries. We overcome this limitation by allowing the equivalent of a public-key OPE. Decision trees are common and very popular classifiers because they are explainable. The problem of evaluating a private decision tree on private data consists of a server holding a private decision tree and a client holding a private attribute vector. The goal is to classify the client’s input using the server’s model such that the client learns only the result of the classification, and the server learns nothing. In a first approach, we represent the tree as an array and execute only d interactive comparisons (instead of 2 d as in existing solutions), where d denotes the depth of the tree. In a second approach, we delegate the complete tree evaluation to the server using somewhat or fully homomorphic encryption where the ciphertexts are encrypted under the client’s public key. A generalization of a decision tree is a random forest that consists of many decision trees. A classification with a random forest evaluates each decision tree in the forest and outputs the classification label which occurs most often. Hence, the classification labels are ranked by their number of occurrences and the final result is the best ranked one. The best ranked element is a special case of the kth-ranked element. In this thesis, we consider the secure computation of the kth-ranked element in a distributed setting with applications in benchmarking and auctions. We propose different approaches for privately computing the kth-ranked element in a star network, using either garbled circuits or threshold homomorphic encryption.

Degree

thesis:*
Level thesis:degree_level
thesis.doctoral
Grantor dc:publisher
Universität Passau
Year
2020

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Tueno, Anselme
Contributors dc:contributor
  • Katzenbeisser, Stefan
  • Kerschbaum, Florian
  • Domingo-Ferrer, Josep

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • Standardbedingung laut Einverständniserklärung

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:kobv.de-opus4-uni-passau:825

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Universität Passau
Base URL
opus4.kobv.de/opus4-uni-passau/oai
Last updated
2026-07-24
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Tueno, Anselme. Multiparty Protocols for Tree Classifiers. thesis.doctoral thesis, Universität Passau, 2020. https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-uni-passau/frontdoor/index/index/docId/825