Analysis of Privacy-preserving Element Reduction of a Multiset

The element reduction of a multiset S is to reduce the number of repetitions of an element in S by a predetermined number. Privacypreserving element reduction of a multiset is an important tool in private computation over multisets. It can be used by itself or by combination with other private set operations. Recently, an efficient privacy-preserving element reduction method was proposed by Kissner and Song [7]. In this paper, we point out a mathematical flaw in their polynomial representation that is used for the element reduction protocol and provide its correction. Also we modify their over-threshold set-operation protocol, using an element reduction with the corrected representation, which is used to output the elements that appear over the predetermined threshold number of times in the multiset resulting from other privacy-preserving set operations.