Introduction: Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) offers a powerful tool for collaborative healthcare research while preserving patient data privacy.
State of the art: However, existing SMPC frameworks often require separate executions for each desired computation and measurement period, limiting user flexibility.
Concept: This research explores the potential of a client-driven metaprotocol for the Federated Secure Computing (FSC) framework and its SImple Multiparty ComputatiON (SIMON) protocol as a step towards more flexible SMPC solutions.
Implementation: This client-driven metaprotocol empowers users to specify and execute multiple calculations across diverse measurement periods within a single client-side code execution. This eliminates the need for repeated code executions and streamlines the analysis process. The metaprotocol offers a user-friendly interface, enabling researchers with limited cryptography expertise to leverage the power of SMPC for complex healthcare analyses.
Lessons learned: We evaluate the performance of the client-driven metaprotocol against a baseline iterative approach. Our evaluation demonstrates performance improvements compared to traditional iterative approaches, making this metaprotocol a valuable tool for advancing secure and efficient collaborative healthcare research.
Keywords: Confidentiality; Cryptography; Health Information Exchange; Medical Research.