Secure and efficient outsourcing of sequence comparisons

Abstract

We treat the problem of secure outsourcing of sequence comparisons by a client to remote servers, which given two strings λ and μ of respective lengths n and m, consists of finding a minimum-cost sequence of insertions, deletions, and substitutions (also called an edit script) that transform λ into μ. In our setting a client owns λ and μ and outsources the computation to two servers without revealing to them information about either the input strings or the output sequence. Our solution is non-interactive for the client (who only sends information about the inputs and receives the output) and the client’s work is linear in its input/output. The servers’ performance is O(σmn) computation (which is optimal) and communication, where σ is the alphabet size, and the solution is designed to work when the servers have only O(σ(m + n)) memory. By utilizing garbled circuit evaluation in a novel way, we completely avoid public-key cryptography, which makes our solution particularly efficient.