Asynchronous Identity Mapping for Privacy-Preserving Subscriber Matching
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing publisher-subscriber frameworks reveal user identity and membership status during broadcast communications, compromising user privacy and unauthorized access to sensitive information.
Innovation Solution
Implement a user-identifier mapping server that anonymizes user identifiers using one-way functions and a trusted third-party to manage communication, ensuring only authorized nodes receive user information, while maintaining user and publisher identity protection.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If user identifiers are broadcast to all subscriber nodes in a publisher-subscriber framework, then information sharing and communication efficiency are improved, but user identity and membership status are revealed, compromising user privacy
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a trusted third-party mapping server as an intermediary between the publisher and subscriber nodes. This server receives anonymized user identifiers from the publisher, translates them into the appropriate local identifiers for each subscriber node, and returns results without revealing the original publisher identity or user membership status. This intermediary mechanism enables information sharing while preserving privacy.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent transforms user identifiers from their original form into anonymized forms using one-way hash functions. The publisher node converts local user identifiers into anonymized identifiers before broadcasting, and the mapping server converts these anonymized identifiers into local identifiers for each subscriber. This parameter transformation enables communication efficiency while preventing identity revelation.
2Speed
If a publisher broadcasts messages to all subscriber nodes, then message delivery speed is improved, but unauthorized nodes gain access to sensitive user information
Solution Approach 1:
The mapping server acts as a mediator that controls information flow between publisher and subscribers. It receives anonymized identifiers from the publisher, determines which subscriber nodes are authorized to receive the information based on their user memberships, and selectively returns results. This prevents unauthorized nodes from accessing sensitive user information while maintaining efficient message delivery.
3Loss of information
If user identifiers are masked using one-way functions, then user identity protection is improved, but the ability to match and translate identifiers across different nodes becomes more complex
Solution Approach 1:
The mapping server serves as a centralized intermediary that manages the complexity of identifier translation. Each subscriber node maintains a mapping table containing anonymized identifiers and their corresponding local identifiers. When the mapping server needs to translate an anonymized identifier, it queries the appropriate subscriber node's mapping table, which returns the local identifier without revealing the original user identity. This distributes the complexity management across multiple nodes.
Data Source
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AI summary
Ensuring user privacy in a publisher-subscriber communications environment. Storing, by a user-identifier mapping server, a user-identity database mapping user identity to subscriber-anonymized user identifier and subscriber identifier for users of said plurality of subscribers. Receiving, by the user-identifier mapping server, an information-request message from a subscriber, the information-request message concerning a notification message from a publisher, the notification message including an anonymized username of a first user of the publisher and wherein the username of the first user is anonymized using the one-way anonymization function. Upon receiving, by the user-identifier mapping server, the information-request message, determining from the user-identity database whether the first user is a user of the subscriber and transmitting a response message to subscriber indicating whether the first user is a user of the subscriber.