IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY, VOL. 10, NO. 1, JANUARY 2015 69
New Algorithms for Secure Outsourcing of
Large-Scale Systems of Linear Equations
Xiaofeng Chen, Xinyi Huang, Jin Li, Jianfeng Ma, Wenjing Lou, and Duncan S. Wong
Abstract—With the rapid development in availability of cloud
services, the techniques for securely outsourcing the prohibitively
expensive computations to untrusted servers are getting more
and more attentions in the scientific community. In this paper,
we investigate secure outsourcing for large-scale systems of linear
equations, which are the most popular problems in various engi-
neering disciplines. For the first time, we utilize the sparse matrix
to propose a new secure outsourcing algorithm of large-scale
linear equations in the fully malicious model. Compared with the
state-of-the-art algorithm, the proposed algorithm only requires
(optimal) one round communication (while the algorithm requires
L rounds of interactions between the client and cloud server,
where L denotes the number of iteration in iterative methods).
Furthermore, the client in our algorithm can detect the misbe-
havior of cloud server with the (optimal) probability 1. Therefore,
our proposed algorithm is superior in both efficiency and
checkability. We also provide the experimental evaluation that
demonstrates the efficiency and effectiveness of our algorithm.
Index Terms— Cloud computing, outsource-secure algorithms,
system of linear equations.
I. INTRODUCTION
C
LOUD Computing, the long dreamed vision of com-
puting as a utility, enables convenient and on-demand
network access to a centralized pool of configurable computing
Manuscript received December 19, 2013; revised May 6, 2014 and
October 10, 2014; accepted October 10, 2014. Date of publication October 16,
2014; date of current version December 5, 2014. This work was supported
in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant
61272455, Grant 61472083 and Grant 61472091, in part by the Doctoral
Fund, Ministry of Education, China, under Grant 20130203110004 and
Grant 20123503120001, in part by the Distinguished Young Scholars Fund,
Department of Education, Fujian Province, under Grant JA13062, in part by
the Fok Ying Tung Education Foundation under Grant 141065, in part by
the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University under Grant
NCET-13-0946, in part by the Program for New Century Excellent Talents
in Universities of Fujian under Grant JA14067, in part by the Fundamental
Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant BDY151402, and in
part by the 111 Project, China, under Grant B08038. The work of W. Lou
was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grant CNS-
1217889. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and
approving it for publication was Dr. Sen-Ching S. Cheung. (Corresponding
author: Xiaofeng Chen.)
X. Chen is with the State Key Laboratory of Integrated Service Networks,
Xidian University, Xi’an 710065, China (e-mail: xfchen@xidian.edu.cn).
X. Huang is with the School of Mathematics and Computer Science, Fujian
Normal University, Fuzhou 350007, China (e-mail: xyhuang81@gmail.com).
J. Li is with the School of Computer Science, Guangzhou University,
Guangzhou 510006, China (e-mail: lijin@gzhu.edu.cn).
J. Ma is with the School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian
University, Xi’an 710065, China (e-mail: jfma@mail.xidian.edu.cn).
W. Lou is with the Department of Computer Science, Virginia Poly-
technic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061 USA (e-mail:
wjlou@vt.edu).
D. S. Wong is with the Department of Computer Science, City University
of Hong Kong, Hong Kong (e-mail: duncan@cityu.edu.hk).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIFS.2014.2363765
resources that can be rapidly deployed with great efficiency
and minimal management overhead [46], [47]. Cloud comput-
ing has plenty of benefits for real-world applications such as
on-demand self-service, ubiquitous network access, location
independent resource pooling, rapid resource elasticity, usage-
based pricing, outsourcing, etc. In the outsourcing computa-
tion paradigm, the users with resource-constraint devices can
outsource heavy computation workloads into the cloud server
and enjoy the unlimited computing resources in a pay-per-
use manner. As a result, the enterprises and individuals can
avoid large capital outlays in hardware/software deployment
and maintenance.
Despite the tremendous benefits, outsourcing computa-
tion also inevitably suffers from some new security chal-
lenges [42], [50]. Firstly, the computation tasks often contain
some sensitive information that should not be exposed to
the (semi-trusted) cloud servers. Therefore, the first security
challenge is the privacy of the outsourcing computation: the
curious cloud servers should not learn anything about what it is
actually computing (including the secret inputs and outputs).
We argue that the traditional encryption technique can only
provide a partial solution to this problem since it is very diffi-
cult to perform meaningful computations over the ciphertext.
Though the fully homomorphic encryption could be a potential
solution, the existing schemes are not practical yet. Secondly,
the semi-trusted cloud servers may return an invalid result. For
example, the servers might contain a software bug that will
fail on a constant number of invocation. Moreover, the servers
might decrease the amount of the computation due to financial
incentives and then return a computationally indistinguishable
(invalid) result. Therefore, the second security challenge is the
checkability of the outsourcing computation: the outsourcer
should have the ability to detect any failures if the cloud
servers misbehave. Trivially, the test procedure should never
be involved in some other complicated computations since
the computationally limited devices may be incapable to
accomplish a complicated test. At the very least, it must be far
more efficient than accomplishing the computation task itself
(recall the motivation for outsourcing computations).
The large-scale system of linear equations Ax = b [8], [23]
is one of the most basic algebraic problems in the scientific
community. In practice, there are many real world problems
that would lead to very large-scale and extremely dense
systems of linear equations with up to hundreds of thousands
or even millions unknown variables. For example, a typical
double-precision 50, 000 × 50, 000 system matrix resulted
from electromagnetic application would easily occupy up to
20 GBytes storage space. Hence, the storage requirements of
the system coefficient matrix may easily exceed the available
1556-6013 © 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.