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

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 [email protected] or on Twitter as @QiuyuX.

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