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Private information retrieval

Authors:

Eyal Kushilevitz,

Oded Goldreich, and

Madhu SudanAuthors Info & Claims

Journal of the ACM (JACM), Volume 45, Issue 6

Pages 965 - 981

https://doi.org/10.1145/293347.293350

Published: 01 November 1998 Publication History

Abstract

Publicly accessible databases are an indispensable resource for retrieving up-to-date information. But they also pose a significant risk to the privacy of the user, since a curious database operator can follow the user's queries and infer what the user is after. Indeed, in cases where the users' intentions are to be kept secret, users are often cautious about accessing the database. It can be shown that when accessing a single database, to completely guarantee the privacy of the user, the whole database should be down-loaded; namely n bits should be communicated (where n is the number of bits in the database).

In this work, we investigate whether by replicating the database, more efficient solutions to the private retrieval problem can be obtained. We describe schemes that enable a user to access k replicated copies of a database (k≥2) and privately retrieve information stored in the database. This means that each individual server (holding a replicated copy of the database) gets no information on the identity of the item retrieved by the user. Our schemes use the replication to gain substantial saving. In particular, we present a two-server scheme with communication complexity O(n^1/3).

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cover image Journal of the ACM

Journal of the ACM Volume 45, Issue 6

Nov. 1998

185 pages

ISSN:0004-5411

EISSN:1557-735X

DOI:10.1145/293347

Editor:
F. Thomson Leighton
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 1998 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 01 November 1998

Published in JACM Volume 45, Issue 6

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