Collaborative, privacy-preserving data aggregation at scale

Abstract

Combining and analyzing data collected at multiple administrative locations is critical for a wide variety of applications, such as detecting malicious attacks or computing an accurate estimate of the popularity of Web sites. However, legitimate concerns about privacy often inhibit participation in collaborative data aggregation. In this paper, we design, implement, and evaluate a practical solution for privacy-preserving data aggregation (PDA) among a large number of participants. Scalability and efficiency is achieved through a "semi-centralized" architecture that divides responsibility between a proxy that obliviously blinds the client inputs and a database that aggregates values by (blinded) keywords and identifies those keywords whose values satisfy some evaluation function. Our solution leverages a novel cryptographic protocol that provably protects the privacy of both the participants and the keywords, provided that proxy and database do not collude, even if both parties may be individually malicious. Our prototype implementation can handle over a million suspect IP addresses per hour when deployed across only two quad-core servers, and its throughput scales linearly with additional computational resources. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.