SplitX: high-performance private analytics

There is a growing body of research on mechanisms for preserving online user privacy while still allowing aggregate queries over private user data. A common approach is to store user data at users' devices, and to query the data in such a way that a differentially private noisy result is produced without exposing individual user data to any system component. A particular challenge is to design a system that scales well while limiting how much the malicious users can distort the result. This paper presents SplitX, a high-performance analytics system for making differentially private queries over distributed user data. SplitX is typically two to three orders of magnitude more efficient in bandwidth, and from three to five orders of magnitude more efficient in computation than previous comparable systems, while operating under a similar trust model. SplitX accomplishes this performance by replacing public-key operations with exclusive-or operations. This paper presents the design of SplitX, analyzes its security and performance, and describes its implementation and deployment across 416 users.