A tutorial on secure outsourcing of large-scale computations for big data

Today’s society is collecting a massive and exponentially growing amount of data that can potentially revolutionize scientific and engineering fields, and promote business innovations. With the advent of cloud computing, in order to analyze data in a cost-effective and practical way, users can outsource their computing tasks to the cloud, which offers access to vast computing resources on an on-demand and pay-per-use basis. However, since users’ data contains sensitive information that needs to be kept secret for ethical, security, or legal reasons, many users are reluctant to adopt cloud computing. To this end, researchers have proposed techniques that enable users to offload computations to the cloud while protecting their data privacy. In this paper, we review the recent advances in the secure outsourcing of large-scale computations for a big data analysis. We first introduce two most fundamental and common computational problems, i.e., linear algebra and optimization, and then provide an extensive review of the data privacy preserving techniques. After that, we explain how researchers have exploited the data privacy preserving techniques to construct secure outsourcing algorithms for large-scale computations.