April 29, 2010 - Gene Tsudik

Title: Sharing Sensitive Information with Privacy

Abstract:
Modern society is increasingly dependent on, and fearful of, the availability of electronic information.
There are numerous realistic scenarios where sensitive data must be (sometimes reluctantly or suspiciously) shared between two or more entities without mutual trust. As often happens, the research community has foreseen the need for mechanisms to enable limited (privacy-preserving) sharing of sensitive information and a number of effective (if not always efficient) solutions have been proposed. Among them, Private Set Intersection techniques are particularly appealing whenever two parties wish to compute an intersection of their respective sets of items without revealing to each other any other information.

This talk motivates the need for Private Set Intersection (PSI) techniques with various features and  privacy properties and illustrates several concrete Private Set Intersection protocols that offer appreciably better efficiency than prior work. We also demonstrate their practicality via experimental results obtained from a prototype implementation and discuss a number of systems issues encountered in developing  a toolkit that provides various flavors of PSI.