International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

CryptoDB

DatashareNetwork: A Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Search Engine for Investigative Journalists

Authors:
Kasra EdalatNejad
Wouter Lueks
Julien Pierre Martin
Soline Ledésert
Anne L'Hôte
Bruno Thomas
Laurent Girod
Carmela Troncoso
Download:
Search ePrint
Search Google
Presentation: Slides
Abstract: Investigative journalists collect large numbers of digital documents during their investigations. These documents can greatly benefit other journalists' work. However, many of these documents contain sensitive information. Hence, possessing such documents can endanger reporters, their stories, and their sources. Consequently, many documents are used only for single, local, investigations. We presented DatashareNetwork, a decentralized and privacy-preserving search system that enables journalists worldwide to find documents via a dedicated network of peers, as the first search engine designed by journalists for journalists in 2020 to address this problem. We start the talk by introducing real-world problems that investigative journalists face and describe DatashareNetwork as a possible solution. Then, we discuss the practical challenges of moving forward from an academic prototype to deploying DatashareNetwork for the International Consortium of Investigative (ICIJ). This talk covers (1) our joint requirement gathering and (2) design with journalists, (3) a user study to help ICIJ with presenting the privacy property of our system to journalists and making utility/privacy trade-off decisions, (4) deployment challenges to integrate DatashareNetwork into ICIJ's IT infrastructure, and finally (5) open problems that require more attention from the community.
Video: https://youtu.be/MwTK6ZQhOQg?t=1689
BibTeX
@misc{rwc-2023-35468,
  title={DatashareNetwork: A Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Search Engine for Investigative Journalists},
  note={Video at \url{https://youtu.be/MwTK6ZQhOQg?t=1689}},
  howpublished={Talk given at RWC 2023},
  author={Kasra EdalatNejad and Wouter Lueks and Julien Pierre Martin and Soline Ledésert and Anne L'Hôte and Bruno Thomas and Laurent Girod and Carmela Troncoso},
  year=2023
}