An essential component of initiatives that aim to address pervasive inequalities of any kind is the ability to collect empirical evidence of both the status quo baseline and of any improvement that can be attributed to prescribed and deployed interventions. Unfortunately, two substantial barriers can arise preventing the collection and analysis of such empirical evidence: (1) the sensitive nature of the data itself and (2) a lack of technical sophistication and infrastructure available to both an initiative's beneficiaries and to those spearheading it. In the last few years, it has been shown that a cryptographic primitive called secure multi-party computation (MPC) can provide a natural technological resolution to this conundrum. MPC allows an otherwise disinterested third party to contribute its technical expertise and resources, to avoid incurring any additional liabilities itself, and (counterintuitively) to reduce the level of data exposure that existing parties must accept to achieve their data analysis goals. However, achieving these benefits requires the deliberate design of MPC tools and frameworks whose level of accessibility to non-technical users with limited infrastructure and expertise is state-of-the-art. We describe our own experiences designing, implementing, and deploying such usable web applications for secure data analysis within the context of two real-world initiatives that focus on promoting economic equality. CCS CONCEPTS • Security and privacy → Privacy-preserving protocols; Human and societal aspects of security and privacy; • Information systems → Information systems applications;
Software applications that employ secure multi-party computation (MPC) can empower individuals and organizations to benefit from privacy-preserving data analyses when data sharing is encumbered by confidentiality concerns, legal constraints, or corporate policies. MPC is already being incorporated into software solutions in some domains; however, individual use cases do not fully convey the variety, extent, and complexity of the opportunities of MPC. This position paper articulates a rolebased perspective that can provide some insight into how future research directions, infrastructure development and evaluation approaches, and deployment practices for MPC may evolve. Drawing on our own lessons from existing real-world deployments and the fundamental characteristics of MPC that make it a compelling technology, we propose a role-based conceptual framework for describing MPC deployment scenarios. Our framework acknowledges and leverages a novel assortment of roles that emerge from the fundamental ways in which MPC protocols support federation of functionalities and responsibilities. Defining these roles using the new opportunities for federation that MPC enables in turn can help identify and organize the capabilities, concerns, incentives, and trade-offs that affect the entities (software engineers, government regulators, corporate executives, end-users, and others) that participate in an MPC deployment scenario. This framework can not only guide the development of an ecosystem of modular and composable MPC tools, but can make explicit some of the opportunities that researchers and software engineers (and any organizations they form) have to differentiate and specialize the artifacts and services they choose to design, develop, and deploy. We demonstrate how this framework can be used to describe existing MPC deployment scenarios, how new opportunities in a scenario can be observed by disentangling roles inhabited by the involved parties, and how this can motivate the development of MPC libraries and software tools that specialize not by application domain but by role.
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