Paper 2015/150

Insynd: Improved Privacy-Preserving Transparency Logging

Roel Peeters and Tobias Pulls

Abstract

Service providers collect and process more user data then ever, while users of these services remain oblivious to the actual processing and utility of the processed data to the service providers. This leads users to put less trust in service providers and be more reluctant to share data. Transparency logging is about service providers continuously logging descriptions of the data processing on their users' data, where each description is intended for a particular user. We propose Insynd, a new cryptographic scheme for privacy-preserving transparency logging. Insynd improves on prior work by (1) increasing the utility of all data sent through the scheme thanks to our publicly verifiable proofs: one can disclose selected events without having to disclose any long term secrets; and (2) enabling a stronger adversarial model: Inysnd can deal with an untrusted server (such as commodity cloud services) through the use of an authenticated data structure named Balloon. Finally, our publicly available prototype implementation shows greatly improved performance with respect to related work and competitive performance for more data-intensive settings like secure logging.