Splinter : practical private queries on public data

Abstract

Every day, millions of people rely on third party services like Google Maps to navigate from A to B. With existing technology, each query provides Google and their affiliates with a track record of where they've been and where they're going. In this thesis, I design, engineer, and implement a solution that offers absolute privacy when making routing queries, through the application of the Function Secret Sharing (FSS) cryptographic primitive. I worked on a library in Golang that applied an optimized FSS protocol, and exposed an API to generate and evaluate different kinds of queries. I then built a system with servers that handle queries to the database, and clients that generate queries. I used DIMACS maps data and the Transit Node Routing (TNR) algorithm to obtain graph data hosted by the servers. Finally, I evaluated the performance of my system for practicality, and compared it to existing private map routing systems.