At Google, we are constantly trying to improve the techniques we use to protect our users' security and privacy. One such project, RAPPOR (Randomized Aggregatable Privacy-Preserving Ordinal Response), provides a new state-of-the-art, privacy-preserving way to learn software statistics that we can use to better safeguard our users’ security, find bugs, and improve the overall user experience.
Building on the concept of randomized response, RAPPOR enables learning statistics about the behavior of users’ software while guaranteeing client privacy. The guarantees of differential privacy, which are widely accepted as being the strongest form of privacy, have almost never been used in practice despite intense research in academia. RAPPOR introduces a practical method to achieve those guarantees.
To understand RAPPOR, consider the following example. Let’s say you wanted to count how many of your online friends were dogs, while respecting the maxim that, on the Internet, nobody should know you’re a dog. To do this, you could ask each friend to answer the question “Are you a dog?” in the following way. Each friend should flip a coin in secret, and answer the question truthfully if the coin came up heads; but, if the coin came up tails, that friend should always say “Yes” regardless. Then you could get a good estimate of the true count from the greater-than-half fraction of your friends that answered “Yes”. However, you still wouldn’t know which of your friends was a dog: each answer “Yes” would most likely be due to that friend’s coin flip coming up tails.
RAPPOR builds on the above concept, allowing software to send reports that are effectively indistinguishable from the results of random coin flips and are free of any unique identifiers. However, by aggregating the reports we can learn the common statistics that are shared by many users. We’re currently testing the use of RAPPOR in Chrome, to learn statistics about how unwanted software is hijacking users’ settings.
We believe that RAPPOR has the potential to be applied for a number of different purposes, so we're making it freely available for all to use. We'll continue development of RAPPOR as a standalone open-source project so that anybody can inspect test its reporting and analysis mechanisms, and help develop the technology. We’ve written up the technical details of RAPPOR in a report that will be published next week at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.
We’re encouraged by the feedback we’ve received so far from academics and other stakeholders, and we’re looking forward to additional comments from the community. We hope that everybody interested in preserving user privacy will review the technology and share their feedback at [email protected].
Posted by Úlfar Erlingsson, Tech Lead Manager, Security Research
Security Key and Chrome incorporate the open Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) protocol from the FIDO Alliance, so other websites with account login systems can get FIDO U2F working in Chrome today. It’s our hope that other browsers will add FIDO U2F support, too. As more sites and browsers come onboard, security-sensitive users can carry a single Security Key that works everywhere FIDO U2F is supported.
Security Key works with Google Accounts at no charge, but you’ll need to buy a compatible USB device directly from a U2F participating vendor. If you think Security Key may be right for you, we invite you to learn more.
Posted by Nishit Shah, Product Manager, Google Security
We started with a modest scope and reward amounts, but have gradually expanded the program over the past few months. We’ve seen some great work so far—and to help guide future submissions, we wanted to share some of our favorites:
A support for seccomp-bpf sandboxing in BIND to minimize the impact of remote code execution bugs.
Addition of Curve25519 and several other primitives in OpenSSH to strengthen its cryptographic foundations and improve performance.
A set of patches to reduce the likelihood of ASLR info leaks in Linux to make certain types of memory corruption bugs more difficult to exploit.
And, of course, the recent attack-surface-reducing function prefix patch in bash that helped mitigate a flurry of “Shellshock”-related bugs.
We hope that this list inspires even more contributions in the year to come. Of course, before participating, be sure to read the rules page. When done, simply send your nominations to [email protected]. And keep up the great work!
For some time, we’ve offered network administrators the ability to require the use of SafeSearch by their users, which filters out explicit content from search results; this is especially important for schools. However, using this functionality has meant that searches were sent over an unencrypted connection to Google. Unfortunately, this has been the target of abuse by other groups looking to snoop on people’s searches, so we will be removing it as of early December.
Going forward, organizations can require SafeSearch on their networks while at the same time ensuring that their users’ connections to Google remain encrypted. (This is in addition to existing functionality that allows SafeSearch to be set on individual browsers and to be enabled by policy on managed devices like Chromebooks.) Network administrators can read more about how to enable this new feature here.
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