Extended Results on Privacy Against Coalitions of Users in User-Private Information Retrieval Protocols
Colleen Swanson

Citation
Colleen Swanson. "Extended Results on Privacy Against Coalitions of Users in User-Private Information Retrieval Protocols". Cryptography and Communications, 7(4):415-437, February 2015.

Abstract
In peer-to-peer user-private information retrieval, or P2P UPIR, the goal is to provide increased privacy for users querying a database. This is accomplished by leveraging a P2P network in which users forward each other's queries to the database. That is, the database is trusted to serve correct answers to user queries, but not trusted to know the identity of the user who sent particular queries (or the source of the queries): users wish to maintain anonymity (relative to other users) with respect to the database. In this paper, we analyze protocols by Swanson and Stinson that are based on combinatorial designs; the use of combinatorial designs for P2P UPIR is a natural approach, because the "balance" properties of designs translate into desirable (and sometimes optimal) security properties in the resulting protocols. Our main contribution is to extend previous work by analyzing the privacy properties of suggested P2P UPIR protocols with respect to coalitions of honest-but-curious users. Previous work focuses on privacy properties achieved with respect to the database; as such, our work lls an important gap in the analysis of these protocols. We provide an analysis of the probabilistic advantage user coalitions have in guessing the source of a query. In particular, when a set of queries is linked by subject matter (i.e., the content of the queries reveals the fact that they have a common source), it is dicult to protect against user coalitions. We provide new results with respect to user attacks on linked queries, and we analyze the use of query hops as a mitigation technique, in which queries

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Citation formats

• HTML

  Colleen Swanson. <a
  href="http://www.terraswarm.org/pubs/475.html"
  >Extended Results on Privacy Against Coalitions of Users
  in User-Private Information Retrieval Protocols</a>,
  <i>Cryptography and Communications</i>,
  7(4):415-437, February 2015.

• Plain text

  Colleen Swanson. "Extended Results on Privacy Against
  Coalitions of Users in User-Private Information Retrieval
  Protocols". <i>Cryptography and
  Communications</i>, 7(4):415-437, February 2015.

• BibTeX

  @article{Swanson15_ExtendedResultsOnPrivacyAgainstCoalitionsOfUsersInUserPrivate,
      author = {Colleen Swanson},
      title = {Extended Results on Privacy Against Coalitions of
                Users in User-Private Information Retrieval
                Protocols},
      journal = {Cryptography and Communications},
      volume = {7},
      number = {4},
      pages = {415-437},
      month = {February},
      year = {2015},
      abstract = {In peer-to-peer user-private information
                retrieval, or P2P UPIR, the goal is to provide
                increased privacy for users querying a database.
                This is accomplished by leveraging a P2P network
                in which users forward each other's queries to the
                database. That is, the database is trusted to
                serve correct answers to user queries, but not
                trusted to know the identity of the user who sent
                particular queries (or the source of the queries):
                users wish to maintain anonymity (relative to
                other users) with respect to the database. In this
                paper, we analyze protocols by Swanson and Stinson
                that are based on combinatorial designs; the use
                of combinatorial designs for P2P UPIR is a natural
                approach, because the "balance" properties of
                designs translate into desirable (and sometimes
                optimal) security properties in the resulting
                protocols. Our main contribution is to extend
                previous work by analyzing the privacy properties
                of suggested P2P UPIR protocols with respect to
                coalitions of honest-but-curious users. Previous
                work focuses on privacy properties achieved with
                respect to the database; as such, our work lls an
                important gap in the analysis of these protocols.
                We provide an analysis of the probabilistic
                advantage user coalitions have in guessing the
                source of a query. In particular, when a set of
                queries is linked by subject matter (i.e., the
                content of the queries reveals the fact that they
                have a common source), it is dicult to protect
                against user coalitions. We provide new results
                with respect to user attacks on linked queries,
                and we analyze the use of query hops as a
                mitigation technique, in which queries},
      URL = {http://terraswarm.org/pubs/475.html}
  }
  

Posted by Barb Hoversten on 14 Jan 2015.
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