The Sharemind secure multi-party computation platform has been developed for over a decade now. During that time, our team has put a lot of research and development effort into it and now it's the most mature platform for privacy-preserving data analytics. Until now, it has not been so easy to try out Sharemind and see what are its capabilities. The options for trying out Sharemind and getting the Sharemind experience were downloading the Sharemind SDK (software development kit) and trying out the Emulator and other tools included with it, or licensing full Sharemind platform. We wanted to make this easier and offer the Sharemind experience with a lot less hassle. So, we started offering trials to individuals and organisations, who are interested in analysing data while preserving data privacy.
If you are unsure whether Sharemind can benefit you, request a trial from us. While setting up and using the Sharemind SDK might require some effort, with the Sharemind trial you will be given access to a web-based graphical environment, where you can immediately start experimenting with Sharemind and its data analytics capabilities.
What do you get with the Sharemind trial?
With Sharemind trial you get access to tools to perform a full privacy-preserving data analytics workflow. We will set up Sharemind servers and tools, which use Sharemind as a core technology and backend service: Rmind Studio (web interface of Rmind, our statistical analysis suite) and CSV Importer web interface, and give you URLs to those tools. As both of the tools use Sharemind platform as a core technology, all values are secret-shared before they are uploaded to Sharemind servers with CSV Importer and the data remains encrypted during statistical analysis with Rmind. After processing, only aggregated results are sent to the user.
Pre-requisites of using the trial
The Rmind language is a general-purpose programming language and does not by itself require knowledge in statistics. It can be used by anyone who has learned programming. To take full advantage of its mathematical statistics features, it is assumed that the user has some knowledge in statistics.
CSV Importer web interface
CSV Importer web interface is a web application for importing CSV data into Sharemind. The tool allows you to describe the structure of a CSV file by specifying the names and types of the columns. It also supports automatically mapping string labels of categories to integers (i.e. creating classifiers) to speed up data analysis since secure multi-party computation on integers is more efficient than on strings. The CSV format is universal, most applications which support some form of tabular data, can export CSV files.
Rmind and Rmind Studio
Rmind is a programming language and a tool for statistical analysis using Sharemind. Rmind is designed to be very similar to the R language, so that statisticians familiar with R feel comfortable using it right from the start. Rmind only sends aggregated results of data analytics to the user and not individual values. In order to completely exert control over what is computed and what is sent to the user, the statistical algorithms in Rmind can also be used in the SecreC programming language which among other things provides stricter control over a work-flow.
Rmind Studio is a web-based graphical user interface for Rmind. It includes a source code editor, a “read-eval-print” loop and embeds the Rmind's manual and its statistical functionality reference.
Figure: Estimating probability of negative payment events with generalised linear model using Rmind Studio.
What can be done with the trial?
Rmind can be used for different tasks. It supports arithmetic and special functions (like sine, logarithm, exponential function) on private (encrypted) values. Data can easily be filtered using Boolean expressions based on other private values. This allows you to program functions that transform inputs from the database and store the private results.
Rmind also supports aggregating values by groups and joining of tables from multiple databases. By using basic programming primitives and data processing algorithms, you can program extract-transform-load (ETL) workflows on private data in Rmind. After transformation, the resulting tables can be analysed further using Rmind's analysis tools.
We also support a set of mathematical statistics functionality such as outlier detection, hypothesis testing, linear and logistic regression, principal component analysis and plotting. For example, this functionality can be used to create reports from analysing private data or to infer predictive models from private training data.
The supported features of Rmind have been chosen based on our customer's needs. The above list is not exhaustive, but rather illustrates what kind of analysis problems can be solved with our technology. Other statistical analysis or data processing algorithms can be implemented in a privacy-preserving manner using Sharemind and Rmind.
Summary
We hope this post gave you an overview of Sharemind trial and tools that come with it - Rmind Studio and CSV Importer web interface. If you need to analyse private data, request a trial to give Sharemind a try or contact us for a Sharemind license.