Pri-RTB: Privacy-preserving real-time bidding for securing mobile advertisement in ubiquitous computing

Abstract Real-time bidding (RTB), one of the major trading mechanisms used for online advertising, allows the advertiser to make an impression-level bid decision. However, the security and privacy concerns of RTB are gaining increasing attention with the recent enforcement of the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In this study, we present a novel privacy-preserving RTB (Pri-RTB) protocol, which aims at preserving both data privacy and utility by performing additively homomorphic encryption on the user profile. To our knowledge, this is the first work to address the privacy issue of the RTB paradigm. We present a formal proof for the security of Pri-RTB under the assumption of the decisional Diffie–Hellman (DDH) problem. We analyze and elaborate the superiority of Pri-RTB over other related works. We also developed a prototype for Pri-RTB and conducted several experiments to evaluate its feasibility and efficiency under different parameters. Our experiments demonstrate that Pri-RTB can work highly efficiently in a practical setting (for example, a scenario with approximately 200 advertisers per auction).