Verifiable and Privacy-Preserving Ad Exchange for Smart Targeted Advertising
Brennan Mosher, Xiangman Li, Yuanyuan He, Jianbing Ni · 2023
In this paper, we propose a novel verifiable and privacy-preserving ad exchange scheme (VPAE) for smart targeted advertising that enables an ad exchange to deliver promotional advertisements to Internet users according to their specific interests, traits, and preferences. VPAE achieves the distinguished feature to preserve private information of both user profiles and advertisers, while allowing users to verify why they receive specific advertisements for adverting transparency. By utilizing homomorphic proxy re-encryption, VPAE addresses the challenge that the ad exchange has the ability to select advertisements for users, but they cannot know more than what they should. Meanwhile, VPAE integrates polynomial evaluations to achieve that the user is capable of verifying why she receives the advertisement, without learning any information of other advertisements that she does not receive. The privacy of both user profiles and advertisers are protected without sacrificing the efficiency of profile matching. We show the computational and communication overhead of VPAE through extensive analysis to demonstrate practicality and resource needs in implementation.1