Privacy-Preserving Certification of Sustainability Metrics

Abstract

Companies are often motivated to evaluate their environmental sustainability, and to make public pronouncements about their performance with respect to quantitative sustainability metrics. Public trust in these declarations is enhanced if the claims are certified by a recognized authority. Because accurate evaluations of environmental impacts require detailed information about industrial processes throughout a supply chain, protecting the privacy of input data in sustainability assessment is of paramount importance. We introduce a new paradigm, called privacy-preserving certification, that enables the computation of sustainability indicators in a privacypreserving manner, allowing firms to be classified based on their individual performance without revealing sensitive information to the certifier, other parties, or the public. In this work, we describe different variants of the certification problem, highlight the necessary security requirements, and propose a provably-secure novel framework that performs the certification operations under the management of an authorized, yet untrusted, party without compromising confidential information.