Confidential Truth Finding with Multi-Party Computation

Abstract

Federated knowledge discovery and data mining are challenged to assess the trustworthiness of data originating from autonomous sources while protecting confidentiality and privacy. Truth-finding algorithms help corroborate data from disagreeing sources. For each query it receives, a truth-finding algorithm predicts a truth value of the answer, possibly updating the trustworthiness factor of each source. Few works, however, address the issues of confidentiality and privacy. We devise and present a secure secret-sharing-based multi-party computation protocol for pseudo-equality tests that are used in truth-finding algorithms to compute additions depending on a condition. The protocol guarantees confidentiality of the data and privacy of the sources. We also present a variants of a truth-finding algorithm that would make the computation faster when executed using secure multi-party computation. We empirically evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol on a state-of-the-art truth-finding algorithm, 3-Estimates, and compare it with that of the baseline plain algorithm. The results confirm that the secret-sharing-based secure multi-party algorithms are as accurate as the corresponding baselines but for proposed numerical approximations that significantly reduce the efficiency loss incurred.