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FreeRec: an anonymous and distributed personalization architecture

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Abstract

We present and evaluate FreeRec, an anonymous decentralized peer-to-peer architecture, designed to bring personalization while protecting the privacy of its users. FreeRec’s decentralized approach makes it independent of any entity wishing to collect personal data about users. At the same time, its onion-routing-like gossip-based overlay protocols effectively hide the association between users and their interest profiles without affecting the quality of personalization. The core of FreeRec consists of three layers of overlay protocols: the bottom layer, rps, consists of a standard random peer sampling protocol ensuring connectivity; the middle layer, PRPS, introduces anonymity by hiding users behind anonymous proxy chains, providing mutual anonymity; finally, the top clustering layer identifies for each anonymous user, a set of anonymous nearest neighbors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of FreeRec by building a decentralized and anonymous content dissemination system. Our evaluation by simulation, our PlanetLab experiments, and our probabilistic analysis show that FreeRec effectively decouples users from their profiles without hampering the quality of personalized content delivery.

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Notes

  1. We use the term node to refer both to a user and to her machine.

  2. We use uppercase characters for public keys and lowercase for private or secret keys.

  3. Clustering is not shown for it has a similar behaviour as PRPS with a bandwidth consumption exactly twice as much as that of the PRPS due to the larger gossip size.

  4. Each PlanetLab node hosts a large number of virtual machines (slivers) that together result in high resource consumption.

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Acknowledgments

This research is part-funded by the ERC Starting Grant GOSSPLE number 204742.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. INRIA Rennes, Rennes, France

    Antoine Boutet, Davide Frey, Arnaud Jégou, Anne-Marie Kermarrec & Heverson B. Ribeiro

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  1. Antoine Boutet
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  2. Davide Frey
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  3. Arnaud Jégou
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  4. Anne-Marie Kermarrec
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  5. Heverson B. Ribeiro
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Correspondence to Antoine Boutet.

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Boutet, A., Frey, D., Jégou, A. et al. FreeRec: an anonymous and distributed personalization architecture. Computing 97, 961–980 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-013-0377-2

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