Pythia: a privacy aware, peer-to-peer network for social search

Emerging "live social search" systems such as Aardvark.com allow users to pose questions to their social network in real time. People can thus obtain answers from real humans for questions that prove too complex for web searches. Centralized systems that broker such queries and answers, however, do not provide adequate privacy. The success of these systems will be limited since users may avoid asking or answering questions related to sensitive topics such as health, political activism, or even innocuous questions which may make the querier seem ignorant. Since social search systems leverage the structure of the social network to better match askers and answerers, standard ideas that hide this structure such as "connect to Aardvark via Tor" fall short. Thus new techniques are needed to preserve the privacy of askers and answerers beyond the currently understood anonymity techniques. We explore the new and unique challenges for privacy, and propose Pythia, a decentralized architecture based on "controlled flooding" to enable privacy-enhanced social search that retains some degree of social network structure.

[1]  Shoichi Saito,et al.  Bifrost : A Novel Anonymous Communication System with DHT , 2009, 2009 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Applications and Technologies.

[2]  George Danezis,et al.  Mixminion: design of a type III anonymous remailer protocol , 2003, 2003 Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2003..

[3]  Dario Rossi,et al.  Understanding Skype signaling , 2009, Comput. Networks.

[4]  Nick Mathewson,et al.  Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router , 2004, USENIX Security Symposium.

[5]  Albert-László Barabási,et al.  Statistical mechanics of complex networks , 2001, ArXiv.

[6]  Refik Molva,et al.  Privacy preserving social networking through decentralization , 2009, 2009 Sixth International Conference on Wireless On-Demand Network Systems and Services.

[7]  David Chaum,et al.  Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms , 1981, CACM.

[8]  Rachel Greenstadt,et al.  Practical Attacks Against Authorship Recognition Techniques , 2009, IAAI.

[9]  Suresh K. Bhavnani,et al.  Important Cognitive Components of Domain-Specific Search Knowledge , 2001, TREC.

[10]  Jinyang Li,et al.  F2F: Reliable Storage in Open Networks , 2006, IPTPS.

[11]  B. Bhattacharjee,et al.  A Protocol for Scalable Anonymous Communication , 1999 .

[12]  David Chaum,et al.  Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments , 1982, CRYPTO.

[13]  Esther Pacitti,et al.  Leveraging P2P overlays for Large-scale and Highly Robust Content Distribution and Search , 2009, VLDB PhD Workshop.

[14]  Dan S. Wallach,et al.  Birds of a FETHR: open, decentralized micropublishing , 2009, IPTPS.

[15]  Filippo Menczer,et al.  Adaptive query routing in peer web search , 2005, WWW '05.

[16]  R. Schroeppel,et al.  A Design for Anonymous , Authenticated Information Sharing , 2022 .

[17]  Mark S. Ackerman,et al.  Searching for expertise in social networks: a simulation of potential strategies , 2005, GROUP.

[18]  Paul F. Syverson,et al.  Onion routing , 1999, CACM.

[19]  Dominic Heutelbeck,et al.  Distributed Leader Election in P2P Systems for Dynamic Sets , 2006, 7th International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM'06).

[20]  Willy Susilo,et al.  Short E-Cash , 2005, INDOCRYPT.

[21]  Carmela Troncoso,et al.  Drac: An Architecture for Anonymous Low-Volume Communications , 2010, Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

[22]  Jun Wang,et al.  TRIBLER: a social‐based peer‐to‐peer system , 2008, IPTPS.

[23]  Michael K. Reiter,et al.  Crowds: anonymity for Web transactions , 1998, TSEC.

[24]  Winston Khoon Guan Seah,et al.  Super nodes positioning for P2P IP telephony over wireless ad-hoc networks , 2007, MUM.

[25]  Lada A. Adamic,et al.  Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something , 2008, WWW.

[26]  Bruno Crispo,et al.  Anonymous opinion exchange over untrusted social networks , 2009, SNS '09.

[27]  Zhiqian Xu,et al.  A Framework of Decentralized PKI Key Management Based on Dynamic Trust , 2008, Security and Management.

[28]  Henning Schulzrinne,et al.  Peer-to-peer internet telephony using SIP , 2005, NOSSDAV '05.

[29]  Zhiyong Xu,et al.  SBARC: A supernode based peer-to-peer file sharing system , 2003, Proceedings of the Eighth IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications. ISCC 2003.

[30]  U Moeller,et al.  Mixmaster Protocol Version 2 , 2004 .

[31]  Miguel Castro,et al.  Debunking some myths about structured and unstructured overlays , 2005, NSDI.

[32]  Thomas E. Anderson,et al.  Privacy-preserving P2P data sharing with OneSwarm , 2010, SIGCOMM '10.

[33]  Keith W. Ross,et al.  A Measurement Study of a Large-Scale P2P IPTV System , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.

[34]  David W. McDonald,et al.  Learning how: the search for craft knowledge on the internet , 2009, CHI.

[35]  Stephen J. Payne,et al.  Knowledge in the head and on the web: using topic expertise to aid search , 2008, CHI.

[36]  George Danezis,et al.  How to Share Your Favourite Search Results while Preserving Privacy and Quality , 2010, Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

[37]  Elizabeth D. Liddy,et al.  The effects of expertise and feedback on search term selection and subsequent learning: Research Articles , 2005 .

[38]  David Chaum,et al.  Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms , 1981, CACM.

[39]  Ye Xia,et al.  Optimal Leader Election Scheme for Peer-to-Peer Applications , 2007, Sixth International Conference on Networking (ICN'07).

[40]  K. Puttaswamy,et al.  Improving anonymity using social links , 2008, 2008 4th Workshop on Secure Network Protocols.

[41]  Christoph Hölscher,et al.  Web search behavior of Internet experts and newbies , 2000, Comput. Networks.

[42]  Damon Horowitz,et al.  The anatomy of a large-scale social search engine , 2010, WWW '10.

[43]  Scott Shenker,et al.  Making gnutella-like P2P systems scalable , 2003, SIGCOMM '03.

[44]  Paul Syverson,et al.  Onion Routing for Anonymous and Private Internet Connections , 1999 .

[45]  Ian Clarke,et al.  Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System , 2000, Workshop on Design Issues in Anonymity and Unobservability.

[46]  Lakshmish Ramaswamy,et al.  A distributed approach to node clustering in decentralized peer-to-peer networks , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.