Private Set Membership Enhancement and Testing

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Final Year Thesis Oral Defense

Title: "Private Set Membership Enhancement and Testing"

by

GAO Xifan

Abstract:

Private Set Membership (PSM) is a fundamental problem in which a client 
wishes to determine whether a certain item is a member of a set held by a 
server, without revealing any information about the set or the item beyond 
the answer to the membership query. This problem arises in many 
privacy-preserving applications, such as private targeted advertising, 
private data sharing, and private recommendation systems. Existing PSM 
schemes have limitations in terms of efficiency, security, or usability, 
which hinder their practical deployment in large-scale scenarios.

In this report, the PSM protocol accomplished by Google will be proposed. 
The protocol is based on the lattice-based cryptography, which enable the 
protocol to design efficient and provably secure PSM schemes and utilizes 
Ring Learning With Errors (RLWE) based Oblivious Pseudo-Random Functions 
(OPRFs) to achieve strong privacy guarantees.


Date            : 4 May 2023 (Thursday)

Time            : 15:00 - 15:40

Venue           : Room 5501 (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Advisor         : Dr. WANG Shuai

2nd Reader      : Dr. XU Dan