Rigorous Privacy-Enabled Interactions with Online Information

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Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) allow people to individually control who can gain access to personal information about them, what those with access can do with that information, and with whom those with access can share the information. PETs include many common security technologies, such as disk encryption, network security technologies, and the ubiquitous Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol used by secure "https" websites around the world. However, there is growing demand for PETs that go beyond just securing information, to actually changing the way people interact with online systems by reducing the amount of information that they need to disclose about their identities and actions. The overarching long-term goal of this project is to construct, in collaboration with our industry partner Sandvine, Inc., scalable and dependable PETs. This project examines three related cutting-edge PETs that can be used by, and benefit, tens or hundreds of millions of Internet users in Canada and around the globe: (1) Private Information Retrieval allows people to issue queries for information from an online database without revealing to the database operators what information it was they were searching for; (2) Anonymous Communications Networks enable people to use the Internet to communicate without revealing their identities, locations, or other personal information; (3) Censorship Resistance technologies allow people worldwide to access information on the Internet, even if an oppressive government tries to restrict their freedoms. We will additionally bolster our study of these PETs with formal techniques to provide rigorous power-efficient automated runtime verification of our protocols and systems, thus ensuring their correctness and robustness. This project will lead to disruptive PETs that will change how people interact with online information. The proposed project satisfies a long-term strategic need for investigating development of error-free and dependable global-scale PETs. Given the global scope and increasing demand for online services, such as social networking, health care, and e-government, this research is timely and important.