Personalized Pseudonyms for Servers in the Cloud, with Qiuyu Xiao from UNC-Chapel Hill

OVS Orbit

Qiuyu Xiao is a PhD student studying computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This episode is a talk that Qiuyu gave at VMware in May. It is based on the paper “Personalized Pseudonyms for Servers in the Cloud,” by Qiuyu Xiao, Michael K. Reiter, and Yinqian Zhangyinqian, originally published in 2017 at Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

You may wish to follow along with Qiuyu's slides.

The paper's abstract is:

A considerable and growing fraction of servers, especially of web servers, is hosted in compute clouds. In this paper we opportunistically leverage this trend to improve privacy of clients from network attackers residing between the clients and the cloud: We design a system that can be deployed by the cloud operator to prevent a network adversary from determining which of the cloud’s tenant servers a client is accessing. The core innovation in our design is a PoPSiCl (pronounced “popsicle”), a persistent pseudonym for a tenant server that can be used by a single client to access the server, whose real identity is protected by the cloud from both passive and active network attackers. When instantiated for TLS-based access to web servers, our design works with all major browsers and requires no additional client-side software and minimal changes to the client user experience. Moreover, changes to tenant servers can be hidden in supporting software (operating systems and web-programming frameworks) without imposing on web-content development. Perhaps most notably, our system boosts privacy with minimal impact to web-browsing performance, after some initial setup during a user’s first access to each web server.

You can reach Qiuyu at [e-mail] or on Twitter as @QiuyuX.

Related episodes.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The intro music in this episode is Drive, featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper music is Yeah Ant featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro music is Space Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.