Privacy-enhanced protocols for Internet transactions

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People around the world use privacy-enhancing technologies, or PETs, to privately communicate, shop, and access information over the Internet. PETs allow them to keep control over their personal information, such as their names, Internet addresses, financial information, reading interests, purchases, and friends. PETs are also used as components of related technologies such as anti-censorship tools that help prevent repressive regimes from blocking citizens' access to information. We propose to develop and improve the protocols underlying PETs, leading to protocols, systems, and products that support better security, privacy, reliability, and performance; this will remove barriers to people using PETs and lead to an overall increase in privacy. In particular, we will look at four specific protocols: efficient zero-knowledge proof protocols to protect one's privacy when requesting authorization to access online resources; robust private information retrieval protocols to protect information about what people are downloading from online databases, even in the presence of software failures, bugs, and malicious code; scalable privacy-preserving communication protocols to allow many more people to use the Internet to communicate and form communities on potentially sensitive topics without having to reveal their identities, whether it be for fear of embarrassment, of persecution, or for their personal safety; and block-resistant anti-censorship protocols to allow citizens in countries where the Internet is censored to access free and open communications in a way that is hard for the censors to detect or block. As part of this project, and in collaboration with our industry partners, we will develop and deploy working software and systems that will allow people around the world to see tangible benefits to their privacy online. We consider this to be an important social outcome of our work.