Secure benchmarking in the cloud

Abstract

Benchmarking is the comparison of one company's key performance indicators (KPI) to the statistics of the same KPIs of its peer group. A KPI is a statistical quantity measuring the performance of a business process. Privacy by means of controlling access to data is of the utmost importance in benchmarking. Companies are reluctant to share their business performance data due to the risk of losing a competitive advantage or being embarrassed. We present a cryptographic protocol for securely computing benchmarks between multiple parties and describe the technical aspects of a proof of concept implementation of SAP's research prototype Global Benchmarking Service (GBS) on Microsoft's cloud technology Windows Azure.