Mehrdad Nojoumian

Mohammad G. Raeini, Mehrdad Nojoumian

During recent years with the increase of data and data analysis needs, privacy preserving data analysis methods have become of great importance. Researchers have proposed different methods for this purpose. Secure multi-party computation is one of such techniques that allows a group of parties to evaluate a function on their data without revealing the data. This is done by secret sharing approach, in which parties share a piece of their data using polynomials and after doing function evaluation on shares of data finally they do a Lagrange interpolation to get the result. Two approaches have been proposed in secure multi-party computation for evaluating a function, arithmetic gates and logical gates. In both of them and since communication is an important step in multi-party computation, errors may happen. So, being able to detect and correct errors is important. Moreover, as adversaries may interrupt communication or manipulate the data, either in communication or during computation, this error detection and correction provide participating parties with a technique to detect such errors. Hence, in this paper we present a secure multi-party computation error correcting technique that has the ability to detect and correct errors on players shares. This technique is based on Berlekamp-Welch error correcting codes and we assume that players shares are generated using Reed-Solomon codes.

Mehrdad Nojoumian

Trust models are widely used in various computer science disciplines. The main purpose of a trust model is to continuously measure trustworthiness of a set of entities based on their behaviors. In this article, the novel notion of "rational trust modeling" is introduced by bridging trust management and game theory. Note that trust models/reputation systems have been used in game theory (e.g., repeated games) for a long time, however, game theory has not been utilized in the process of trust model construction; this is where the novelty of our approach comes from. In our proposed setting, the designer of a trust model assumes that the players who intend to utilize the model are rational/selfish, i.e., they decide to become trustworthy or untrustworthy based on the utility that they can gain. In other words, the players are incentivized (or penalized) by the model itself to act properly. The problem of trust management can be then approached by game theoretical analyses and solution concepts such as Nash equilibrium. Although rationality might be built-in in some existing trust models, we intend to formalize the notion of rational trust modeling from the designer's perspective. This approach will result in two fascinating outcomes. First of all, the designer of a trust model can incentivise trustworthiness in the first place by incorporating proper parameters into the trust function, which can be later utilized among selfish players in strategic trust-based interactions (e.g., e-commerce scenarios). Furthermore, using a rational trust model, we can prevent many well-known attacks on trust models. These two prominent properties also help us to predict behavior of the players in subsequent steps by game theoretical analyses.