Privacy preserving store retrieval

[decanus]

Problem

Currently mailservers have a lot of power to gain information about users, they can link IPs to topics an account is interested in.

Possible Solutions

Talek may be an interesting solution to enable more privacy preserving mailservers, we should research if it is possible to change mailservers to talek nodes and if this would make sense.

Resources

• https://github.com/privacylab/talek
• https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08250.pdf

[decanus]

Limitations

So it is interesting to note that there are several limitations when it comes to Talek, these are taken directly from the paper.

First, the current implementation of Talek does not guarantee liveness; any user in a trusted group can block writes to that group’s log. Similarly, a faulty server can impact availability. Clients can detect but not attribute such faults. Hence, service providers should be chosen with reputations for high availability.

[decanus]

Benchmark

Something that stands out to me right now is that in the testing set up they were able to achieve 9.4k messages per second, it would be interesting to benchmark this against whispers mailservers in an identical set up and see where it stands.

[oskarth]

More of a general research problem, moving to other repo

[oskarth]

cc @staheri14 fyi