When: Tuesday, March 4, at 14.00
Where: PCRI building, room 455
Who: Benjamin Nguyen
Title: Privacy-Preserving Query Execution using a Decentralized Architecture and Tamper Resistant Hardware
Abstract:
Current applications, from complex sensor systems (e.g. quantified self) to online e-markets acquire vast quantities of personal information which usually ends-up on central servers. Decentralized architectures, devised to help individuals keep full control of their data, hinder global treatments and queries, impeding the development of services of great interest. This paper promotes the idea of pushing the security to the edges of applications, through the use of secure hardware devices controlling the data at the place of their acquisition. To solve this problem, we propose secure distributed querying protocols based on the use of a tangible physical element of trust, reestablishing the capacity to perform global computations without revealing any sensitive information to central servers. There are two main problems when trying to support SQL in this context: perform joins and perform aggregations. In this paper, we study the subset of SQL queries without joins and show how to secure their execution in the presence of honest-but-curious attackers. Cost models and experiments demonstrate that this approach can scale to nationwide infrastructures.
Joint work with Quoc-Cuong To and Philippe Pucheral.
