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Abstract
For population studies or for the training of complex machine learning
models, it is often required to gather data from different actors. In these
applications, summation is an important primitive: for computing means, counts
or mini-batch gradients. In many cases, the data is privacy-sensitive and
therefore cannot be collected on a central server. Hence the summation needs to
be performed in a distributed and privacy-preserving way. Existing solutions
for distributed summation with computational privacy guarantees make trust or
connection assumptions - e.g., the existence of a trusted server or
peer-to-peer connections between clients - that might not be fulfilled in real
world settings. Motivated by these challenges, we propose Secure Summation via
Subset Sums (S5), a method for distributed summation that works in the presence
of a malicious server and only two honest clients, and without the need for
peer-to-peer connections between clients. S5 adds zero-sum noise to clients'
messages and shuffles them before sending them to the aggregating server. Our
main contribution is a proof that this scheme yields a computational privacy
guarantee based on the multidimensional subset sum problem. Our analysis of
this problem may be of independent interest for other privacy and cryptography
applications.