A Survey on Secure Processing of Similarity Queries

With the rapid growth of the volume and diversity of digital data produced by all kinds of commercial, scientific and leisure-time applications, the extraction of useful information from these large data sets has become one of the key IT tasks. On the other hand, the constant monitoring of people’s activities, while using these applications, has raised people’s concern about the invasiveness of their privacy. Furthermore, institutes that own sensitive databases want to keep their data private, while providing data mining services to other parties. Thus, a considerable amount of research effort has been invested in the secure processing of a large variety of queries. In this survey, I will review protocols that can process secure similarity queries in different application domains: location proximity detection, biometric data recognition, similar document detection, and search over multimedia database. Most of these protocols are based on the secure multiparty computation (SMC) model and are provably secure.