Definition
Private information retrieval (PIR) protocol allows a user to retrieve the i-th bit of an n-bit database, without revealing to the database server the value of i. A trivial solution is for the user to retrieve the entire database, but this approach may incur enormous communication cost. A good PIR protocol is expected to have considerably lower communication complexity. Private block retrieval (PBR) is a natural and more practical extension of PIR in which, instead of retrieving only a single bit, the user retrieves a block of bits from the database.
Historical Background
PIR was first introduced by Chor, Goldreich, Kushilevitz, and Sudan [4] in 1995 in a multi-server setting, where the user retrieves information from multiple database servers, each of which has a copy of the same database. To ensure user privacy in the multi-server setting, the servers must be trusted not to collude. In [4], Chor et al. have shown that if only a single database is used, nbits must be...
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Beimel A, Ishai Y. Information-theoretic private information retrieval: a unified construction. In: Proceedings of the 28th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming; 2001. p. 912–26.
Cachin C, Micali S, Stadler M. Computationally private information retrieval with polylogarithmic communication. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptographic Techniques; 1999. p. 402–14.
Chang Y. Single database private information retrieval with logarithmic communication. In: Proceedings of the 9th Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy; 2004. p. 50–61.
Chor B, Goldreich O, Kushilevitz E, Sudan M. Private information retrieval. In: Proceedings of the 36th IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science; 1995. p. 41–51.
Chor B, Kushilevitz E, Goldreich O, Sudan M. Private information retrieval. J ACM. 1998;45(6) L965–81.
Damgard I, Jurik M. A generalisation. A simplification and some applications of Paillier’s probabilistic public-key system. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptography; 2001. p. 119–36.
Devet C, Goldberg I, Heninger N. Optimally robust private information retrieval. In: Proceedings of the 12th USENIX Security Symposium; 2012. p. 13–13.
Gasarch, W. A survey on private information retrieval. Bull EATCS. 2004; 82:72–107.
Gentry C. Fully homomorphic encryption using ideal lattices. In: Proceedings of the 41st Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing; 2009. p. 169–78.
Gentry C. Toward basing fully homomorphic encryption on worst-case hardness. In: Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference on Advances in Cryptology; 2010. p. 116–37.
Gentry C, Ramzan Z. Single database private information retrieval with constant communication rate. In: Proceedings of the 32nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming; 2005. p. 803–15.
Goldreich, O. and Levin, LA. A hard-core predicate for all one-way functions. In: Proceedings of the 21st Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing; 1989. p. 25–32.
Goldwasser S, Micali S. Probabilistic encryption. J Comput Syst Sci. 1984;28(2):270–99.
Kushilevitz E, Ostrovsky R. Replication is not needed: single database, computationally-private information retrieval. In: Proceedings of the 38th Annual IEEE Symposium on the Foundations of Computer Science; 1997. p. 364–73.
Kushilevitz E, Ostrovsky R. One-way trapdoor permutations are sufficient for non-trivial single-server private information retrieval. In: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Theory and Application of Cryptographic Techniques; 2000. p. 104–21.
Lipmaa H. An oblivious transfer protocol with log-squared communication. In: Proceedings of the 8th Information Security Conference; 2005. p. 314–28.
Lipmaa H. First CPIR protocol with data-dependent computation. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Information Security and Cryptology; 2009 p. 193–210.
Lliev A, Smith SW. Protecting client privacy with trusted computing at the server. IEEE Secur Priv. 2005;3(2):20–28.
Naor M, Pinkas B. Oblivious transfer with adaptive queries. In: Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Cryptology Conference on Advances in Cryptology; 1999. p. 791–91.
Naor M, Yung M. Universal one-way hash functions and their cryptographic applications. In: Proceedings of the 21st Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing; 1989. p. 33–43.
Ostrovsky R, Skeith WE III. Private searching on streaming data. In: Proceedings of the 25th Annual International Conference on Advances in Cryptology; 2005. p. 223–40.
Ostovsky R, Skeith WE III. A survey of single-database PIR: Techniques and applications. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Practice and Theory in Public-Key Cryptography; 2007. p. 393–411.
Ostrovsky R, Skeith WE III. Private searching on streaming data. J Cryptol. 2007;20(4):397–430.
Paillier P. Public key cryptosystems based on composite degree residue classes. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptographic Techniques; 1999. p. 223–38.
Paulet R, Kaosar MG, Yi X, Bertino E. Privacy-preserving and content-protecting location based queries. In: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Data Engineering; 2012. p. 44–53.
Paulet R, Kaosar MG, Yi X, Bertino E. Privacy-preserving and content-protecting location based queries. IEEE transactions on knowledge and data engineering, 2014; 26(5):1200–10.
Pohlig S, Hellman M. An improved algorithm for computing logarithms over GF(p) and its cryptographic significance. IEEE Trans Inf Theory. 1978;24(1):106–10.
Sion R, Carbunar B. On the computational practicality of private information retrieval. In: Proceedings of the Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium; 2007.
Wang S, Ding X, Deng RH, Bao F. Private information retrieval using trusted hardware. In: Proceedings of the 11th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security; 2006. p. 49–64.
Yi X, Kaosar M, Paulet R, Bertino E. Single-database private information retrieval from fully homomorphic encryption. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng. 2013;25(5):1125–34.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
About this entry
Cite this entry
Yi, X. (2018). Private Information Retrieval. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_80752
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_80752
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-8266-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-8265-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceReference Module Computer Science and Engineering