Protecting web users’ privacy
Most website visits these days entail a database query — to look up airline flights, for example, or to find the fastest driving route between two addresses. But online database queries can reveal a surprising amount of information about the people making them. And some travel sites have been known to jack up the prices on flights whose routes are drawing an unusually high volume of queries. At the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation next week, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Stanford University will present a new encryption system that disguises users’ database queries so that they reveal no private information. The system is called Splinter because it splits a query up and distributes it across copies of the same database on multiple servers. The servers return results that make sense only when recombined according to a procedure that the user alone knows. As long...