Secure Join Operations in Multi-Identifier Databases: Performance and Practicality

In this work, we present an efficient and cryptographically secure protocol for multi-key inner-join computation that addresses the limitations of existing approaches. Our protocol leverages established Circuit Private Set Intersection (PSI) techniques to privately compute left-joins over individual key columns. These results are then securely aggregated into a final inner-join table using a novel private permutation protocol, which achieves a speedup of approximately 2× to 4× over prior methods. To enhance utility without compromising privacy, we introduce a deduplication mechanism based on ordered left-joins, enabling first-key deduplication while revealing no sensitive matching information. We formally analyze the security of our construction in the semi-honest model. Furthermore, we optimize the equality testing subroutine, a core component of Circuit PSI, reducing its round complexity without an increase in computational overhead.

Empirically, our system demonstrates strong scalability, processing up to 1.8 × 10 4 records of 4 keys per second per CPU core. This represents a significant improvement over industry solutions such as Google's and Meta's, which are not only slower but also reveal more information about the input databases.