Rigorous Privacy-Enabled Interactions with Online Information

隐私增强技术（PET）允许人们单独控制谁可以访问他们的个人信息，访问者可以使用该信息做什么，以及访问者可以与谁共享信息。 PET包括许多常见的安全技术，例如磁盘加密、网络安全技术以及世界各地安全的“https”网站所使用的普遍存在的传输层安全（TLS）协议。 然而，人们对PET的需求越来越大，不仅仅是保护信息，而是通过减少人们需要披露的有关其身份和行为的信息量来实际改变人们与在线系统交互的方式。 该项目的总体长期目标是与我们的行业合作伙伴Sandvine公司合作，可扩展且可靠的PET。本项目研究了三种相关的尖端PETS，它们可以被加拿大和地球仪的数千万或数亿互联网用户使用，并使其受益：（1）私人信息检索允许人们从在线数据库中查询信息，而不向数据库操作员透露他们正在搜索的信息;（2）匿名通信网络使人们能够使用互联网进行通信，而不会泄露他们的身份、位置或其他个人信息;（3）审查抵抗技术允许世界各地的人们访问互联网上的信息，即使一个压迫性的政府试图限制他们的自由。 我们还将通过正式技术来加强对这些PET的研究，为我们的协议和系统提供严格的节能自动运行时验证，从而确保其正确性和鲁棒性。 这个项目将导致颠覆性的宠物，将改变人们如何与在线信息互动。 拟议的项目满足了研究无错误且可靠的全球规模PET开发的长期战略需求。 考虑到全球范围和对在线服务（如社交网络，医疗保健和电子政务）日益增长的需求，这项研究是及时和重要的。

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.