BUSec Group Series: Eli Baum

Speaker: Eli Baum

Talk Title: "ORQ: Complex Analytics on Private Data with Strong Security Guarantees "

Abstract: In this talk, I will present ORQ (to appear at SOSP 2025), a system that enables collaborative analysis of large private datasets using multi-party computation. ORQ protects data against semi-honest or malicious parties and can efficiently evaluate relational queries with multi-way joins and aggregations that have been considered notoriously expensive under MPC. To do so, ORQ eliminates the quadratic cost of secure joins by leveraging the fact that, in practice, the structure of many real queries allows us to join records and apply the aggregations “on the fly” while keeping the result size bounded. We evaluate ORQ in LAN and WAN deployments on a diverse set of workloads, including complex queries with multiple joins and custom aggregations. When compared to state-of-the-art solutions, ORQ significantly reduces MPC execution times and can process one order of magnitude larger datasets. For our most challenging workload, the full TPC-H benchmark, we report results entirely under MPC with Scale Factor 10—a scale that had previously been achieved only with information leakage or the use of trusted third parties.

Bio: Eli Baum is a third-year PhD student at BU, co-advised by John Liagouris and Mayank Varia. His research focuses on applied multiparty computation. He also dabbles in circuit obfuscation. Eli received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from Yale in 2019, and worked in wireless communication and security before starting his PhD.