Session Date/Time: 29 Mar 2023 04:00

pearg

Summary

The pearg session covered several topics related to privacy and attribution in online systems. Discussions included updates on active drafts, presentations on intra-private attribution (IPA), secure positioning protocols, and strengthening certificate transparency. The session focused on technical challenges and potential solutions for preserving privacy in various online contexts.

Key Discussion Points

Draft Updates: Updates were provided on active drafts including "IP address privacy considerations," "censorship survey," and "safe measurement guidance."
Intra-Private Attribution (IPA): Martin Thompson presented an overview of IPA, a system designed for private advertising attribution using multi-party computation (MPC) and differential privacy. The discussion covered technical challenges related to MPC performance, communication complexity, and the difficulty in defining the functionality and associated parameters for the technology.
Secure Positioning Protocols: Filip discussed secure positioning protocols for distributed computations, focusing on partitioning encrypted reports without revealing identifiers. He presented two protocols: dense partitioning and sparse partitioning and touched on their properties like low overhead and efficiency. He also asked about interest in standardizing such protocols separately from IPA.
Strengthening Certificate Transparency: Alexandra presented work on strengthening certificate transparency against government-level attacks. This involved a new approach to certificate issuance and logging that included a lottery protocol to prevent manipulation by malicious actors or logs.

Decisions and Action Items

Matt Apple will work on the "IP address privacy considerations" draft, taking into account structural changes and organization discussions.
The "censorship survey" draft is awaiting review and updates before moving forward.
The chairs will work to get the drafts on generation of Trans Numeric identifier and unfortunate history of Transient numeric identifier published.

Next Steps

Martin Thompson plans to continue active research and discussions with the advertising industry on IPA. He hopes to run trials using real advertising data this year.
Potential application of Npc in draft should be evaluated.
Alexandra will continue to work on critical analysis and further development, potentially exploring the inclusion of monitoring services in log pick protocols.