README
¶
Checklist: Private Blocklist Lookups
This code accompanies the Checklist paper by Dmitry Kogan and Henry Corrigan-Gibbs.
Checklist is a system for privacy-preserving blocklist lookups. That is: a pair of servers holds a set B of blocklisted strings, a client holds a private string s, and the client wants to learn whether s is in the blocklist B without revealing its private string s to the servers.
The technical components of Checklist are:
- a new two-server private-information-retrieval protocol (the
pir/directory), - a technique that extends preprocessing offline/online PIR schemes to support database updates (see the
updatable/directory), and - a Safe-Browsing service proxy that allows Firefox to perform Safe Browsing API lookups via Checklist (see the
cmd/sbproxy/andcmd/rpcserver/directories).
Code organization
The directories in this repository are:
| Core PIR library | |
|---|---|
| pir/ | Core PIR protocol code |
| psetggm/ | Optimized C++ implementation of puncturable-set primitive |
| Extension: Database updates | |
| updatable/ | Implementation of offline/online PIR with database updates |
| Networking and benchmarking | |
| driver/ | Wrapper code for benchmarks |
| rpc/ | RPC over HTTPS |
| Examples and applications | |
| example/ | Example of how to invoke our basic PIR library |
| cmd/rpc_server | Checklist server executable |
| cmd/sbproxy | Code to proxy Firefox SafeBrowsing requests through Checklist |
PIR library
Our implementation supports the following PIR protocols, which we implement in the pir/ directory. In the bulleted list below, λ ≈ 128 is the security parameter and n is the number of rows in the database. We ignore leading constants.
pir.Punc- Checklist's new two-server offline/online PIR scheme. The PIR scheme has offline server time λn, offline communication λn^{1/2}, online server time n^{1/2}, and online communication λlog(n).pir.Matrix- A simple two-server PIR scheme based on the original PIR paper of Chor, Goldreich, Kushilevitz, and Sudan. The PIR scheme has offline server time 0, offline communication 0, online server time n, and online communication n^{1/2}.pir.DPF- A DPF-based two-server PIR, based on the "Function Secret Sharing" work of Boyle, Gilboa, and Ishai. The PIR scheme has offline server time 0, offline communication 0, online server time n, and online communication λlog(n).pir.NonPrivate- Fetch a database record with no privacy.
Safe Browsing proxy for Firefox
To try running Checklist's Safe Browsing proxy for Firefox, follow these steps, each in a separate terminal, starting from the repository root.
1. Build the project
$ go build ./...
2. Run Checklist servers
# Run two Checklist servers in the background
$ go run ./cmd/rpc_server -f safebrowsing/evil_urls.txt -p 8800 &
$ go run ./cmd/rpc_server -f safebrowsing/evil_urls.txt -p 8801
3. Run the local Safe Browsing proxy
$ go run ./cmd/sbproxy -serverAddr=localhost:8800,localhost:8801
# Listens on localhost:8888
4. Run Firefox with a modified profile
The directory safebrowsing/ff-profile contains a Firefox profile that's configured to make Safe Browsing API requests to the proxy at localhost:8888.
$ cd safebrowsing
$ ./run_browser.sh
When you open Firefox, you should see some activity on the proxy and PIR servers. Test the system is working by navigating to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page, which we added as a test URL in safebrowsing/evil_urls.txt
Directories
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| Path | Synopsis |
|---|---|
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cmd
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Package safebrowsing is a generated protocol buffer package.
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Package safebrowsing is a generated protocol buffer package. |