Cryptographically secure multiparty evaluation of system reliability
This addresses privacy concerns in reliability assessments for system designers and component manufacturers, though it is incremental as it combines existing cryptographic and reliability theory methods.
The paper tackles the problem of evaluating system reliability while preserving the privacy of both the system design and component test data, achieving this through a cryptographically secure multiparty protocol that maintains almost total privacy.
The precise design of a system may be considered a trade secret which should be protected, whilst at the same time component manufacturers are sometimes reluctant to release full test data (perhaps only providing mean time to failure data). In this situation it seems impractical to both produce an accurate reliability assessment and satisfy all parties' privacy requirements. However, we present recent developments in cryptography which, when combined with the recently developed survival signature in reliability theory, allows almost total privacy to be maintained in a cryptographically strong manner in precisely this setting. Thus, the system designer does not have to reveal their trade secret design and the component manufacturer can retain component test data in-house.