Secure outsourcing of sequence comparisons

Internet computing technologies, like grid computing, enable a weak computational device connected to such a grid to be less limited by its inadequate local computational, storage, and bandwidth resources. However, such a weak computational device (PDA, smartcard, sensor, etc.) often cannot avail itself of the abundant resources available on the network because its data are sensitive. This motivates the design of techniques for computational outsourcing in a privacy-preserving manner, i.e., without revealing to the remote agents whose computational power is being used either one's data or the outcome of the computation. This paper investigates such secure outsourcing for widely applicable sequence comparison problems and gives an efficient protocol for a customer to securely outsource sequence comparisons to two remote agents. The local computations done by the customer are linear in the size of the sequences, and the computational cost and amount of communication done by the external agents are close to the time complexity of the best known algorithm for solving the problem on a single machine. © Springer-Verlag 2005.