Collaborative Research: IMR: MM-1B: Foundations for Differentially Private Internet Measurement

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Internet measurement research has been providing critical insights and evidence support in guiding the design of Internet infrastructures. However, how to share and use Internet measurement data while respecting users' privacy is still challenging. To protect privacy, most works choose to anonymize sensitive fields or only publish the aggregated statistics, but such methods are vulnerable to privacy attacks. Differential privacy, which provides guaranteed privacy protection for data release, has gained prominent traction from companies and government agencies, and is a natural choice for sharing Internet measurement data. However, a critical gap remains to identify how differential privacy can be applied to networking problems. This project aims to understand privacy issues and then lay the foundations for deploying differential privacy in the processing pipeline of Internet measurement data. The project's broader significance and importance include transferring the technologies to industry, involving members from under-represented groups, and disseminating outcomes through K-12 outreach and community services.The project is structured around three main aims. Thrust 1 conducts a comprehensive study of the privacy issues in the existing practices in collecting and sharing Internet measurement data, and develops an inference attack benchmark to assess the privacy risks and the benefits of different protection mechanisms. Thrust 2 investigates how differential privacy can be adjusted and integrated into the processing pipeline of Internet measurement data, by developing new configurable and relaxed differential privacy notions. Thrust 3 develops methods to publish synthetic Internet measurement data while satisfying differential privacy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.