Secure two party comparison over encrypted data

Abstract

Yao's classical millionaires' problem is about securely determining whether x>y, given two input values x, y, which are held as private inputs by two parties, respectively. The output which is result of comparison becomes known to both parties. In this paper we consider a variant of comparison problem in which the inputs x, y are encrypted and the actual values are not known to the parties. Our first solution deals with single comparison; however, in many applications, we encounter situations where it is necessary to make multiple comparisons to find the maximum among several encrypted data, so we make a modification to our first protocol to solve the multiple comparisons problem. Such a secure comparison is an important building block for applications like privacy preserving data mining and secure business. Our second protocol is based on Homomorphic encryption which achieves very low communication and computational complexities. Also our protocols can be performed in constant rounds and do not use general circuit evaluation techniques so they are more efficient than circuit based ones but not general. Implementation is easy and fast.