Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 1996/005

Private Information Storage

Rafail Ostrovsky, Victor Shoup

Abstract: We consider the setting of hiding information through the use of multiple databases that do not interact with one another. Previously, in this setting solutions for retrieval of data in the efficient manner were given, where a user achieves this by interacting with all the databases. We consider the case of both writing and reading. While the case of reading was well studied before, the case of writing was previously completely open. In this paper, we show how to implement both read and write operations. As in the previous papers, we measure, as a function of k and n the amount of communication required between a user and all the databases for a single read/write operation, and achieve efficient read/write schemes. Moreover, we show a general reduction from reading database scheme to reading and writing database scheme, with the following guarantees: for any k, given a retrieval only k-database scheme with communication complexity R(k,n) we show a (k+1) reading and writing database scheme with total communication complexity O(R(k,n) * (log n)^{O(1)}). It should be stressed that prior to the current paper no trivial (i.e. sub-linear) bounds for private information storage were known.

Category / Keywords: (none supplied)

Publication Info: Appeared in the THEORY OF CRYPTOGRAPHY LIBRARY and has been included in the ePrint Archive.

Date: received May 16th, 1996.

Contact author: rafail at bellcore com

Available format(s): Postscript (PS) | Compressed Postscript (PS.GZ) | BibTeX Citation

Short URL: ia.cr/1996/005

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