Collaborative Privacy in Big Data: Secure Multi-Party Computation for Shared Analytics

Introduction In the realm of big data, where organizations amass terabytes of information from diverse sources, collaborative analytics holds immense promise for unlocking collective insights. Industries like healthcare, finance, and supply chain management benefit from pooled data to enhance decision-making, predict trends, and innovate. However, sharing raw data poses severe risks, including privacy breaches, intellectual property theft, and regulatory non-compliance. Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) emerges as a cryptographic paradigm that allows multiple parties to jointly compute functions on their private inputs without revealing the inputs themselves—only the output is disclosed. SMPC, rooted in cryptographic research from the 1980s, has evolved to address big data's scale, enabling distributed computations across clouds, edge devices, and federated systems. This chapter explores SMPC's principles, protocols, applications in big data analytics, challenges, an...