Distributed Measurement with Private Set-Union Cardinality

Presented by Akshaya Mani         

Tuesday, October 17, 2017
4:00 p.m.
ICSI Lecture Hall

Abstract:

How many unique users are connecting to Tor? How many hidden services are being accessed? This talk introduces a cryptographic protocol for efficiently aggregating a count of unique items across a set of data collectors privately - that is, without exposing any information other than the count. The correctness and security of the protocol is formally proved in the Universal Composability framework against an active adversary that compromises all but one of the aggregation parties. The protocol also provides security against adaptive corruption of the distributed data collectors, which prevents them from being victims of targeted compromise. We also demonstrate that the computation and communication overheads of the protocol are moderate. In particular, for reasonable deployment sizes, the protocol runs at timescales smaller than the typical measurement period.

Speaker Bio: 

 Akshaya Mani is a fourth year PhD student at Georgetown University. Her academic interests include the broad areas of security, privacy and applied cryptography. She enjoys architecting lightweight cryptographic solutions to real-world security and privacy problems.