Privacy-preserving data collection through k-anonymityĬollecting data on how software is used in detail can be helpful for both developers and users. STAR is available in an open source Rust implementation, and will be used to protect user privacy in many current and future Brave products. The STAR system will be presented at the 2022 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) in Los Angeles, and is being discussed for possible standardization in the IETF.

STAR, by contrast, provides privacy guarantees similar to, or better than, existing systems, while being practical and affordable for projects and organizations serving anywhere from dozens to millions of users.

Existing systems 2 are extremely expensive to deploy (making them unusable for all but the largest companies), require trusted third-parties or special hardware, and/or require millions of users to achieve useful results. STAR’s main goals are to provide strong privacy guarantees while still being usable and affordable for small-to-medium sized companies. Such systems are important for performing privacy-protecting, Web-scale measurements of software (sometimes referred to as analytics or telemetry). Researchers at Brave have developed STAR 1, a system that allows users to participate in private data collection, under cryptographic guarantees that their data will be readable only if other users have contributed the exact same values. This post was written by Senior Director of Privacy Peter Snyder.

This post describes work done by Alex Davidson, Peter Snyder, eV Quirk, Joseph Genereux, Benjamin Livshits, and Hamed Haddadi. This is the nineteenth post in an ongoing, regular series describing new and upcoming privacy features in Brave.

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