Approximate Two-Party Privacy-Preserving String Matching with Linear Complexity

Consider two parties who want to compare their strings, e.g., genomes, but do not want to reveal them to each other. We present a system for privacy-preserving matching of strings, which differs from existing systems by providing a deterministic approximation instead of an exact distance. It is efficient (linear complexity), non-interactive and does not involve a third party which makes it particularly suitable for cloud computing. We extend our protocol, such that it mitigates iterated differential attacks proposed by Goodrich. Further an implementation of the system is evaluated and compared against current privacy-preserving string matching algorithms.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Ontology-based Search Algorithms over Large-Scale Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Networks

Peer-to-Peer(P2P) systems have emerged as a promising paradigm to structure large scale distributed systems. They provide a robust, scalable and decentralized way to share and publish data.The unstructured P2P systems have gained much popularity in recent years for their wide applicability and simplicity. However efficient resource discovery remains a fundamental challenge for unstructured P2P networks due to the lack of a network structure. To effectively harness the power of unstructured P2P systems, the challenges in distributed knowledge management and information search need to be overcome. Current attempts to solve the problems pertaining to knowledge management and search have focused on simple term based routing indices and keyword search queries. Many P2P resource discovery applications will require more complex query functionality, as users will publish semantically rich data and need efficiently content location algorithms that find target content at moderate cost. Therefore, effective knowledge and data management techniques and search tools for information retrieval are imperative and lasting. In my dissertation, I present a suite of protocols that assist in efficient content location and knowledge management in unstructured Peer-to-Peer overlays. The basis of these schemes is their ability to learn from past peer interactions and increasing their performance with time.My work aims to provide effective and bandwidth-efficient searching and data sharing in unstructured P2P environments. A suite of algorithms which provide peers in unstructured P2P overlays with the state necessary in order to efficiently locate, disseminate and replicate objects is presented. Also, Existing approaches to federated search are adapted and new methods are developed for semantic knowledge representation, resource selection, and knowledge evolution for efficient search in dynamic and distributed P2P network environments. Furthermore,autonomous and decentralized algorithms that reorganizes an unstructured network topology into a one with desired search-enhancing properties are proposed in a network evolution model to facilitate effective and efficient semantic search in dynamic environments

When private set intersection meets big data : an efficient and scalable protocol

Large scale data processing brings new challenges to the design of privacy-preserving protocols: how to meet the increasing requirements of speed and throughput of modern applications, and how to scale up smoothly when data being protected is big. Efficiency and scalability become critical criteria for privacy preserving protocols in the age of Big Data. In this paper, we present a new Private Set Intersection (PSI) protocol that is extremely efficient and highly scalable compared with existing protocols. The protocol is based on a novel approach that we call oblivious Bloom intersection. It has linear complexity and relies mostly on efficient symmetric key operations. It has high scalability due to the fact that most operations can be parallelized easily. The protocol has two versions: a basic protocol and an enhanced protocol, the security of the two variants is analyzed and proved in the semi-honest model and the malicious model respectively. A prototype of the basic protocol has been built. We report the result of performance evaluation and compare it against the two previously fastest PSI protocols. Our protocol is orders of magnitude faster than these two protocols. To compute the intersection of two million-element sets, our protocol needs only 41 seconds (80-bit security) and 339 seconds (256-bit security) on moderate hardware in parallel mode

PatchIndex: exploiting approximate constraints in distributed databases

Cloud data warehouse systems lower the barrier to access data analytics. These applications often lack a database administrator and integrate data from various sources, potentially leading to data not satisfying strict constraints. Automatic schema optimization in self-managing databases is difficult in these environments without prior data cleaning steps. In this paper, we focus on constraint discovery as a subtask of schema optimization. Perfect constraints might not exist in these unclean datasets due to a small set of values violating the constraints. Therefore, we introduce the concept of a generic PatchIndex structure, which handles exceptions to given constraints and enables database systems to define these approximate constraints. We apply the concept to the environment of distributed databases, providing parallel index creation approaches and optimization techniques for parallel queries using PatchIndexes. Furthermore, we describe heuristics for automatic discovery of PatchIndex candidate columns and prove the performance benefit of using PatchIndexes in our evaluation

Flexible Application-Layer Multicast in Heterogeneous Networks

This work develops a set of peer-to-peer-based protocols and extensions in order to provide Internet-wide group communication. The focus is put to the question how different access technologies can be integrated in order to face the growing traffic load problem. Thereby, protocols are developed that allow autonomous adaptation to the current network situation on the one hand and the integration of WiFi domains where applicable on the other hand

Temporal graph mining and distributed processing

With the recent growth of social media platforms and the human desire to interact with the digital world a lot of human-human and human-device interaction data is getting generated every second. With the boom of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, a lot of device-device interactions are also now on the rise. All these interactions are nothing but a representation of how the underlying network is connecting different entities over time. These interactions when modeled as an interaction network presents a lot of unique opportunities to uncover interesting patterns and to understand the dynamics of the network. Understanding the dynamics of the network is very important because it encapsulates the way we communicate, socialize, consume information and get influenced. To this end, in this PhD thesis, we focus on analyzing an interaction network to understand how the underlying network is being used. We define interaction network as a sequence of time-stamped interactions E over edges of a static graph G=(V, E). Interaction networks can be used to model many real-world networks for example, in a social network or a communication network, each interaction over an edge represents an interaction between two users, e.g., emailing, making a call, re-tweeting, or in case of the financial network an interaction between two accounts to represent a transaction. We analyze interaction network under two settings. In the first setting, we study interaction network under a sliding window model. We assume a node could pass information to other nodes if they are connected to them using edges present in a time window. In this model, we study how the importance or centrality of a node evolves over time. In the second setting, we put additional constraints on how information flows between nodes. We assume a node could pass information to other nodes only if there is a temporal path between them. To restrict the length of the temporal paths we consider a time window in this approach as well. We apply this model to solve the time-constrained influence maximization problem. By analyzing the interaction network data under our model we find the top-k most influential nodes. We test our model both on human-human interaction using social network data as well as on location-location interaction using location-based social network(LBSNs) data. In the same setting, we also mine temporal cyclic paths to understand the communication patterns in a network. Temporal cycles have many applications and appear naturally in communication networks where one person posts a message and after a while reacts to a thread of reactions from peers on the post. In financial networks, on the other hand, the presence of a temporal cycle could be indicative of certain types of fraud. We provide efficient algorithms for all our analysis and test their efficiency and effectiveness on real-world data. Finally, given that many of the algorithms we study have huge computational demands, we also studied distributed graph processing algorithms. An important aspect of distributed graph processing is to correctly partition the graph data between different machine. A lot of research has been done on efficient graph partitioning strategies but there is no one good partitioning strategy for all kind of graphs and algorithms. Choosing the best partitioning strategy is nontrivial and is mostly a trial and error exercise. To address this problem we provide a cost model based approach to give a better understanding of how a given partitioning strategy is performing for a given graph and algorithm.Con el reciente crecimiento de las redes sociales y el deseo humano de interactuar con el mundo digital, una gran cantidad de datos de interacción humano-a-humano o humano-a-dispositivo se generan cada segundo. Con el auge de los dispositivos IoT, las interacciones dispositivo-a-dispositivo también están en alza. Todas estas interacciones no son más que una representación de como la red subyacente conecta distintas entidades en el tiempo. Modelar estas interacciones en forma de red de interacciones presenta una gran cantidad de oportunidades únicas para descubrir patrones interesantes y entender la dinamicidad de la red. Entender la dinamicidad de la red es clave ya que encapsula la forma en la que nos comunicamos, socializamos, consumimos información y somos influenciados. Para ello, en esta tesis doctoral, nos centramos en analizar una red de interacciones para entender como la red subyacente es usada. Definimos una red de interacciones como una sequencia de interacciones grabadas en el tiempo E sobre aristas de un grafo estático G=(V, E). Las redes de interacción se pueden usar para modelar gran cantidad de aplicaciones reales, por ejemplo en una red social o de comunicaciones cada interacción sobre una arista representa una interacción entre dos usuarios (correo electrónico, llamada, retweet), o en el caso de una red financiera una interacción entre dos cuentas para representar una transacción. Analizamos las redes de interacción bajo múltiples escenarios. En el primero, estudiamos las redes de interacción bajo un modelo de ventana deslizante. Asumimos que un nodo puede mandar información a otros nodos si estan conectados utilizando aristas presentes en una ventana temporal. En este modelo, estudiamos como la importancia o centralidad de un nodo evoluciona en el tiempo. En el segundo escenario añadimos restricciones adicionales respecto como la información fluye entre nodos. Asumimos que un nodo puede mandar información a otros nodos solo si existe un camino temporal entre ellos. Para restringir la longitud de los caminos temporales también asumimos una ventana temporal. Aplicamos este modelo para resolver este problema de maximización de influencia restringido temporalmente. Analizando los datos de la red de interacción bajo nuestro modelo intentamos descubrir los k nodos más influyentes. Examinamos nuestro modelo en interacciones humano-a-humano, usando datos de redes sociales, como en ubicación-a-ubicación usando datos de redes sociales basades en localización (LBSNs). En el mismo escenario también minamos camínos cíclicos temporales para entender los patrones de comunicación en una red. Existen múltiples aplicaciones para cíclos temporales y aparecen naturalmente en redes de comunicación donde una persona envía un mensaje y después de un tiempo reacciona a una cadena de reacciones de compañeros en el mensaje. En redes financieras, por otro lado, la presencia de un ciclo temporal puede indicar ciertos tipos de fraude. Proponemos algoritmos eficientes para todos nuestros análisis y evaluamos su eficiencia y efectividad en datos reales. Finalmente, dado que muchos de los algoritmos estudiados tienen una gran demanda computacional, también estudiamos los algoritmos de procesado distribuido de grafos. Un aspecto importante de procesado distribuido de grafos es el de correctamente particionar los datos del grafo entre distintas máquinas. Gran cantidad de investigación se ha realizado en estrategias para particionar eficientemente un grafo, pero no existe un particionamento bueno para todos los tipos de grafos y algoritmos. Escoger la mejor estrategia de partición no es trivial y es mayoritariamente un ejercicio de prueba y error. Con tal de abordar este problema, proporcionamos un modelo de costes para dar un mejor entendimiento en como una estrategia de particionamiento actúa dado un grafo y un algoritmo