CS297 Proposal

Description:

Yioop is an open source software that functions as a search engine and a social platform with groups, discussion board and wiki. A previous student, Pragya Rana, had worked on adding differential privacy to the some of the statistics generated by the Yioop discussion board and the search engine. Her work will be continued in this project by extending differential privacy to the viewable statistics like number of users per group. We will also explore encrypting and decrypting data using secret sharing and homomorphic encryption schemes.

Schedule:

Deliverables:

The full project will be done when CS298 is completed. The following will be done by the end of CS297:

1. Create a encrypted group in Yioop, add users and threads to the group to see how these changes reflect in the database inorder to understand how the existing privacy mechanism in Yioop works

2. Implement differential privacy to mask user statistics in Yioop i.e., number of users in groups. This deliverable ensures that Yioop is protected against statistical attacks

3. Implement secret sharing encryption such that users have parts of the secret but no individual holds any useful information that can reveal the secret. Further explore what happens when a sufficient number of users combine their parts of the secret

4. Implement homomorphic encryption by reading relevant papers and coding a working encryption mechanism. The chosen homomorphic encryption scheme is Paillier cryptosystem which will be implemented and its homomorphic properties proven

5. CS297 Report

References:

[1] C. Dwork, "Differential Privacy, 33rd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, part II", 2006
[2] C. Dwork et al., "Differential Privacy - A Primer for the Perplexed", Conference of European Statisticians, 2011
[3] A. Shamir, "How to share a secret", Communications of the ACM, 612,613
[4] M. O.Keeffe, "The Paillier Cryptosystem. A Look Into The Cryptosystem And Its Potential Application", College of New Jersey, 2008