Order-preserving encryption allows encrypting data, while still enabling
efficient range queries on the encrypted data. Moreover, it does not require
any change to the database management system, because comparison operates on
ciphertexts as on plaintexts. This makes order-preserving encryption schemes
very suitable for data outsourcing in cloud computing scenarios. However, all
order-preserving encryption schemes are necessarily symmetric limiting the use
case to one client and one server. Imagine a scenario where a Data Owner
encrypts its data before outsourcing it to the Cloud Service Provider and a
Data Analyst wants to execute private range queries on this data. This scenario
occurs in many cases of collaborative machine learning where data source and
processor are different entities. Then either the Data Owner must reveal its
encryption key or the Data Analyst must reveal the private queries. In this
paper, we overcome this limitation by allowing the equivalent of a public-key
order-preserving encryption. We present a secure multiparty protocol that
enables secure range queries for multiple users. In this scheme, the Data
Analyst cooperates with the Data Owner and the Cloud Service Provider in order
to order-preserving encrypt the private range queries without revealing any
other information to the parties. We implemented our scheme and observed that
if the database size of the Data Owner has 1 million entries it takes only
about 0.3 s on average via a loopback interface (1.3 s via a LAN) to encrypt an
input of the Data Analyst.