Collaborative Research: CNS Core: Small: Privacy by Memory Design

Differential privacy (DP) has been widely accepted as the de facto technique for protecting data privacy. Despite the decade-long research efforts on DP, there still exists a critical research problem that has been largely overlooked, that is all existing DP studies are grounded on the hypothesis that software can easily and faithfully sample and add noises from a probability distribution. However, this hypothesis is being constantly challenged by recent findings about its privacy violation and by the growing demand of privacy protection in low-end devices that may lack high-level software libraries. Hence, this project's innovative research angle is to realize DP mechanisms directly on embedded memories, which are ubiquitous in modern electronic devices. On the technical front, the developed innovation has the following merits. (1) It frees host devices from dedicated software and accomplishes the vision of "privacy by design"; (2) It concurrently improves manifold system performance such as power efficiency, privacy, and chip overhead; (3) The developed technique is primitive, generic, and scalable to every electronic device. This project will also create profound impact on our society, economy, and workforce development. Specifically, the developed technique will be transformative to numerous sensitive applications (e.g., surveillance and sensing) and critical infrastructures (e.g., Internet of Things devices). It will potentially increase the U.S. chip vendors' revenue and competitiveness by adding privacy-preserving functionality to their chips, protect taxpayers' and enterprises' sensitive data, safeguard national security, and help the U.S. out-compete global competitors in cybersecurity. Moreover, this project will help PIs to update existing curricula, engage students for research training, and promote community outreach through existing successful programs such as the NSF-funded RET site in Mobile, Alabama. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.