DPWeVote: differentially private weighted voting protocol for cloud-based decision-making

ABSTRACT

With the advent of Industry 4.0, cloud computing techniques have been increasingly adopted by industry practitioners to achieve better workflows. One important application is cloud-based decision-making, in which multiple enterprise partners need to arrive an agreed decision. Such cooperative decision-making problem is sometimes formed as a weighted voting game, in which enterprise partners express ‘YES/NO’ opinions. Nevertheless, existing cryptographic approaches to Cloud-Based Weighted Voting Game have restricted collusion tolerance and heavily rely on trusted servers, which are not always available. In this work, we consider the more realistic scenarios of having semi-honest cloud server/partners and assuming maximal collusion tolerance. To resolve the privacy issues in such scenarios, the DPWeVote protocol is proposed which incorporates Randomized Response technique and consists the following three phases: the Randomized Weights Collection phase, the Randomized Opinions Collection phase, and the Voting Results Release phase. Experiments on synthetic data have demonstrated that the proposed DPWeVote protocol managed to retain an acceptable utility for decision-making while preserving privacy in semi-honest environment.