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Working on privacy tech has taught me that zero knowledge is absolutely critical if you want true privacy. Statistical correlation is stupidly powerful. Identi

by Taek 6y ago

Working on privacy tech has taught me that zero knowledge is absolutely critical if you want true privacy. Statistical correlation is stupidly powerful. Identifying someone uniquely in the world requires about 33 bits of entropy. Which means you have have some statistical analysis that reveals 0.01 bits of information per sample, you only need 3300 samples to uniquely identify the person performing the activity. It's a bit tough to explain without having actual examples, but the same math that allows a javascript library running in a web browser to extract the private key being computed in a VM elsewhere on the machine can also be used to identify which individual people have diabetes from looking at a stack of "anonymized" health reports, or which individual people are watching porn from looking at an aggregated history of request sizes going through a VPN.

heavenlyblue 6y ago
> the same math that allows a javascript library running in a web browser to extract the private key being computed in a VM elsewhere on the machine I am not entirely certain whether I was clear about the point I made in my message, however I have asked a very specific technical question and you are making some generalised sweeping statement about privacy in the most widely used case. We could not decrypt any ancient languages, for example; if we didn’t have an equivalent of a Rosetta Stone for them. Thus you should not be able to do the same for the encrypted database I assume.
- sukilot 6y ago
  "hiding the database" is security-through-obscurity, which is not security.
disabled 6y ago
> 33 bits of entropy For the clueless (including myself--I just looked this up), if doing a brute-force search to identify or reidentify someone using "anonymized" data (which is what this poster is referring to), it only takes 2^33 attempts, or 8,589,934,592 attempts (on a bit scale--binary--0 or 1), to exhaust all other possibilities (such as other people--when reidentifying people via health data that was "anonymized"), when tracing to find a person via data in general. Obviously some data is more sensitive than others, but that has little relevance: it requires nearly no data (especially in terms of what is being hoarded about each and every one of us) and virtually no effort or computing power, to be found. This also means that even the most mundane (and always sensitive, too--although some data is more sensitive!) data that has been hoarded about you will be used against you, in ways you would have never imagined. It will be used for processing and inferences (which you are unaware of) will be made on you. You are already probably part of several unhealthy social experiments that you are unaware of, via correlations from mundane data, using things that are pervasive such as AI.

by Taek 6y ago

heavenlyblue 6y ago

> the same math that allows a javascript library running in a web browser to extract the private key being computed in a VM elsewhere on the machine I am not entirely certain whether I was clear about the point I made in my message, however I have asked a very specific technical question and you are making some generalised sweeping statement about privacy in the most widely used case. We could not decrypt any ancient languages, for example; if we didn’t have an equivalent of a Rosetta Stone for them. Thus you should not be able to do the same for the encrypted database I assume.

sukilot 6y ago
"hiding the database" is security-through-obscurity, which is not security.

disabled 6y ago

> 33 bits of entropy For the clueless (including myself--I just looked this up), if doing a brute-force search to identify or reidentify someone using "anonymized" data (which is what this poster is referring to), it only takes 2^33 attempts, or 8,589,934,592 attempts (on a bit scale--binary--0 or 1), to exhaust all other possibilities (such as other people--when reidentifying people via health data that was "anonymized"), when tracing to find a person via data in general. Obviously some data is more sensitive than others, but that has little relevance: it requires nearly no data (especially in terms of what is being hoarded about each and every one of us) and virtually no effort or computing power, to be found. This also means that even the most mundane (and always sensitive, too--although some data is more sensitive!) data that has been hoarded about you will be used against you, in ways you would have never imagined. It will be used for processing and inferences (which you are unaware of) will be made on you. You are already probably part of several unhealthy social experiments that you are unaware of, via correlations from mundane data, using things that are pervasive such as AI.