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Ask HN: How to run analytics on data without access to the data?

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Re: Ask HN: How to run analytics on data without access to the data?

#41

Post by hunter2_ »

meowface wrote: post #39
michealr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analytics wise, I'm ok with being restricted, other commenters have mentioned looking at WASM as a possible workaround. So local does seem to make the most sense, practicality wise A thought, the possible scope of services in the data notary or data escrow side of things does seem like an underexplored product category.

Any such data notary/escrow company has a pretty good shot of eventually getting breached (they'd naturally be a prime target, since the attackers could get tons of data from tons of people on behalf of tons of different companies), and that'll possibly destroy that company and maybe also your app. There's also the risk they may eventually have rogue employees, etc.

Regular notaries could be as crooked as rogue employees, yet we still use them because imperfect barriers are still barriers (as with security).

But yeah, when computer-related vulnerabilities are thrown into the mix, it could get ugly.

Re: Ask HN: How to run analytics on data without access to the data?

#42

Post by meowface »

hunter2_ wrote: post #41
meowface wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any such data notary/escrow company has a pretty good shot of eventually getting breached (they'd naturally be a prime target, since the attackers could get tons of data from tons of people on behalf of tons of different companies), and that'll possibly destroy that company and maybe also your app. There's also the risk they may eventually have rogue employees, etc.

Regular notaries could be as crooked as rogue employees, yet we still use them because imperfect barriers are still barriers (as with security). But yeah, when computer-related vulnerabilities are thrown into the mix, it could get ugly.

Sure, there's often going to be some centralized source one needs to trust. The issue with a digital escrow vendor is kind of like the issue with cryptocurrency exchanges - one single breach and you immediately walk out with an unfathomably huge treasure trove.

A rogue notary employee can do some damage and notarize things in exchange for bribes, and a rogue bank employee could help siphon some money away, but a rogue digital escrow employee could be bribed to hand over terabytes of extremely sensitive data on lots of big customers, and a rogue cryptocurrency exchange employee could possibly help someone steal hundreds of millions of dollars pretty easily. It's a huge house of cards.

Re: Ask HN: How to run analytics on data without access to the data?

#44

Post by jhoechtl »

michealr wrote: post #14
jhoechtl wrote: post #11

What about Fully Homomorphic encryption? Would a FHE scheme enable to discover patterns without seeing the data?

I theory I assume it would, my bottleneck would be just knowledge. Just don't know enough about FHE to comfortably work with it. FHE as a service would be my little mini dream.

There used to be an MIT CISAL research project I find no more traces which had as a project goal to establish FHE as a service.

Apparently it failed.

Re: Ask HN: How to run analytics on data without access to the data?

#45

Post by noisenotsignal »

dumbfounder wrote: post #6
franky47 wrote: post #3

I asked myself a similar question for web analytics a year ago [1]: how to provide a service without having access to the underlying data. It requires shifting the processing onto the client side, so it limits what you can do, but it's best for privacy, and security (since the data never leaves the native app or browser). [1] https://chiffre.io

Client side is the first answer, but is there a second? Is there a way to peer review a piece of code that can run in a 3rd party container (peer review and cryptographically signed), such that the actual container running the code is encrypted itself and can run anywhere? I am imagining you download the "container", put the data in, encrypt the container with the data inside, and have that run anywhere. But I have n…

It's not really "run anywhere", but you can write apps for a trusted execution environment like Intel SGX enclaves; not even the OS can look at what's running. Enclave code is cryptographically signed so that you can both validate the identity of the signer as well as the code contents. In the latter, you'd have to compare the MRENCLAVE value to a published value, which you could reproduce by building from source if it's open.

Microsoft calls this "confidential computing" and has some related Azure products, including providing VMs standalone and in Kubernetes.

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