Secure sharing in distributed information management applications: problems and directions

Interaction between entities who may not trust each other is now commonplace on the Internet. This paper focuses on the specific problem of sharing information between distrusting parties. Previous work in this area shows that privacy and utility can co-exist, but often do not provide strong assurances of one or the other. In this paper, we sketch a research agenda with several directions for attacking these problems, considering several alternative systems that examine the privacy vs. utility problem from different angles. We consider new mechanisms such as economic incentives to share data or discourage data leakage and a hybrid of code-splitting and secure multi-party computation to provide various assurances of secrecy. We discuss how to incorporate these mechanisms into practical applications, including online social networks, a recommendation system based on users’ qualifications rather than identities, and a “personal information broker” that monitors data leakage over time. We hope that this paper will spark ideas and conversation at ACITA about directions most worth pursuing.