Susanne Wetzel

Malte Breuer, Ulrike Meyer, Susanne Wetzel

To this day, there are still some countries where the exchange of kidneys between multiple incompatible patient-donor pairs is restricted by law. Typically, legal regulations in this context are put in place to prohibit coercion and manipulation in order to prevent a market for organ trade. Yet, in countries where kidney exchange is practiced, existing platforms to facilitate such exchanges generally lack sufficient privacy mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving protocol for kidney exchange that not only addresses the privacy problem of existing platforms but also is geared to lead the way in overcoming legal issues in those countries where kidney exchange is still not practiced. In our approach, we use the concept of secret sharing to distribute the medical data of patients and donors among a set of computing peers in a privacy-preserving fashion. These computing peers then execute our new Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) protocol among each other to determine an optimal set of kidney exchanges. As part of our new protocol, we devise a privacy-preserving solution to the maximum matching problem on general graphs. We have implemented the protocol in the SMPC benchmarking framework MP-SPDZ and provide a comprehensive performance evaluation. Furthermore, we analyze the practicality of our protocol when used in a dynamic setting (where patients and donors arrive and depart over time) based on a data set from the United Network for Organ Sharing.

Malte Breuer, Ulrike Meyer, Susanne Wetzel

Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) allows a set of parties to securely compute a functionality in a distributed fashion without the need for any trusted external party. Usually, it is assumed that the parties know each other and have already established authenticated channels among each other. However, in practice the parties sometimes must stay anonymous. In this paper, we conceptualize a framework that enables the repeated execution of an SMPC protocol for a given functionality such that the parties can keep their participation in the protocol executions private and at the same time be sure that only authorized parties may take part in a protocol execution. We identify the security properties that an implementation of our framework must meet and introduce a first implementation of the framework that achieves these properties.

Alan Sherman, M. Dark, A. Chan et al.

Since fall 2012, several National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Research (CAE-Rs) fielded a collaborative course to engage students in solving applied cybersecurity research problems. We describe our experiences with this Information Security Research and Education (INSuRE) research collaborative. We explain how we conducted our project-based research course, give examples of student projects, and discuss the outcomes and lessons learned.