CASO: Cost-Aware Secure Outsourcing of General Computational Problems

TL;DR

This paper introduces CASO, a cost-aware secure outsourcing scheme for general computational problems that balances security and computational overhead, ensuring data privacy and solution validity in cloud computing.

Contribution

It proposes affine mapping based problem transformation and verification schemes that enhance security while maintaining practical computational overhead.

Findings

CASO effectively balances security and computational costs.

The scheme ensures end-user data privacy during outsourcing.

It provides a verification method for solution correctness.

Abstract

Computation outsourcing is an integral part of cloud computing. It enables end-users to outsource their computational tasks to the cloud and utilize the shared cloud resources in a pay-per-use manner. However, once the tasks are outsourced, the end-users will lose control of their data, which may result in severe security issues especially when the data is sensitive. To address this problem, secure outsourcing mechanisms have been proposed to ensure security of the end-users' outsourced data. In this paper, we investigate outsourcing of general computational problems which constitute the mathematical basics for problems emerged from various fields such as engineering and finance. To be specific, we propose affine mapping based schemes for the problem transformation and outsourcing so that the cloud is unable to learn any key information from the transformed problem. Meanwhile, the overhead for the transformation is limited to an acceptable level compared to the computational savings introduced by the outsourcing itself. Furthermore, we develop cost-aware schemes to balance the trade-offs between end-users' various security demands and computational overhead. We also propose a verification scheme to ensure that the end-users will always receive a valid solution from the cloud. Our extensive complexity and security analysis show that our proposed Cost-Aware Secure Outsourcing (CASO) scheme is both practical and effective.