An Architecture for Privacy-Preserving Telemetry Scheme

Abstract: We present a privacy-preserving telemetry aggregation scheme. Our underlying frequency estimation routine works within the framework of differential privacy. The design philosophy follows a client-server architecture. Furthermore, the system uses a local differential privacy scheme where data gets randomized on the client before submitting the request to the resource server. This scheme allows for data analysis on de-identified data by carefully adding noise to prevent re-identification attacks, thereby facilitating public data release without compromising the identifiability of the individual record. This work further enhances privacy guarantees by leveraging Oblivious HTTP (OHTTP) to achieve increased privacy protection for data in transit that addresses pre-existing privacy vulnerabilities in raw HTTP. We provide an implementation that focuses on frequency estimation with a histogram of a known dictionary. Our resulting formulation based on OHTTP has provided stricter privacy safeguards when compared to trusting an organization to manually delete identifying information from the client's request in the ingestor as deployed in reference work~\cite{apple2017}. Code available at https://github.com/kenluck2001/miscellaneous/tree/master/src/Privacy-Preserving-Telemetry.