Lightweight privacy-preserving peer-to-peer data integration

Abstract

Peer Data Management Systems (PDMS) are an attractive solution for managing distributed heterogeneous information. When a peer (client) requests data from another peer (server) with a different schema, translations of the query and its answer are done by a sequence of intermediate peers (translators). There are two privacy issues in this P2P data integration process: (i) answer privacy: no unauthorized parties (including the translators) should learn the query result; (ii) mapping privacy: the schema and the value mappings used by the translators to perform the translation should not be revealed to other peers. Elmeleegy and Ouzzani proposed the PPP protocol that is the first to support privacy-preserving querying in PDMS. However, PPP suffers from several shortcomings. First, PPP does not satisfy the requirement of answer privacy, because it is based on commutative encryption; we show that this issue can be fixed by adopting another cryptographic technique called oblivious transfer. Second, PPP adopts a weaker notion for mapping privacy, which allows the client peer to observe certain mappings done by translators. In this paper, we develop a lightweight protocol, which satisfies mapping privacy and extend it to a more complex one that facilitates parallel translation by peers. Furthermore, we consider a stronger adversary model where there may be collusions among peers and propose an efficient protocol that guards against collusions. We conduct an experimental study on the performance of the proposed protocols using both real and synthetic data. The results show that the proposed protocols not only achieve a better privacy guarantee than PPP, but they are also more efficient.