Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Markulf Kohlweiss

Manuel Costa

Christos Gkantsidis

Cedric Fournet

Olga Ohrimenko

George Danezis

Divya Sharma

A data center has a plurality of secure processing units; a plurality of data stores holding encrypted data records; and a network connecting the secure processing units and the data stores. The secure processing units comprise computing functionality configured to execute a data processing operation in parallel on the secure processing units by being configured to read encrypted records from the stores, process one or more of the encrypted records within the secure processing units, send one or more of the encrypted records to the stores. The data center is configured to carry out a secret shuffle of the data records to protect the privacy of data processed in the data center from an observer observing any one or more of: the reading of the records, the sending of the records, the writing of the records; the secret shuffle comprising a random permutation of the records hidden from the observer.

Data center privacy

Privacy-preserving metering with low overhead is described. In an embodiment consumption of a resource such as electricity, car insurance, cloud computing resources is monitored by a meter and bills are created in a manner which preserves privacy of a customer but at the same reduces bandwidth use between a meter and a provider of the resource. For example, fine grained meter readings which describe customer behavior are kept confidential without needing to send large cryptographic commitments to meter readings from a meter to a provider. In an example, meter readings are encrypted and sent from a meter to a provider who is unable to decrypt the readings. In examples a cryptographic signature is generated to commitments to the meter readings and only the signature is sent to a provider thus reducing bandwidth. For example, a customer device is able to regenerate the commitments using the signature.

Privacy-preserving metering with low overhead

Growing community of inventors

Cambridge, United Kingdom

Markulf Kohlweiss