Internship
subject:
Privacy
protection in log analysis
Name
of the host laboratory:
LIX,
Ecole Polytechnique
Supervisors:
Kostas
Chatzikokolakis and Catuscia Palamidessi (INRIA and LIX)
Kreshnik
Musaraj (Thales)
Internship
description:
This
stage will be part of a project involving the Laboratory of
Computer Science of the Ecole Polytechnique and the
industrial group Thales. The project aims at
developing a system to provide privacy protection in log
analysis. The goal is to allow the analyst to detect
from logs suspicious and possibly foul activity, while
protecting at the same time the privacy of the employees
who have originated those logs.
The
idea is to use an aggregation-oriented database technology tike OLAP
[1] to represent the data of interest and their correlation, and
then to apply differential privacy, a framework recently
emerged in the community of statistical databases, to
ensure the protection of sensitive and personal information.
The typical way this protection is achieved is by adding
some controlled noise to the answer, every time the
database is queried.
The
intern will have the opportunity to work both at the practical
level, to help with concrete case studies and the development of
the system and its testing, and at the conceptual level, to
ensure that the intended degree of privacy is met.
The
intern will receive an internship salary financed by
Thales.
The
internship is supposed to be used by the candidate to produce his/her
master thesis. There will be the possibility of continuing working
with the team, on the topic of Differential Privacy, as a PhD
student. A preference will be given to the students who are
willing to continue as PhDs.
Bibliography:
[1]
Gray, Jim; Bosworth, Adam; Layman, Andrew; Priahesh, Hamid. "Data
Cube: A Relational Aggregation Operator Generalizing Group-By,
Cross-Tab, and Sub-Totals". Proc. 12th International
Conference on Data Engineering. IEEE. pp. 152–159
[2] Cynthia Dwork. Differential Privacy. International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 2006), p. 1–12.
Contact
people:
Kostas
Chatzikokolakis and Catuscia
Palamidessi
Team:
Comète
(http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/comete/index.php)
Candidate’s
required level:
Master’s
student (2nd year).
Proposed
Duration:
4-6
months
Prerequisites:
Attitude
for formal and mathematical reasoning
Some knowledge of
Probability Theory and/or Database Management Systems would be
welcome