A Survey of Single Database PIR: Techniques and Applications

Rafail Ostrovsky; William E.  Skeith III

Paper 2007/059

A Survey of Single Database PIR: Techniques and Applications

Rafail Ostrovsky and William E. Skeith III

Abstract

In this paper we survey the notion of Single-Database Private Information Retrieval (PIR). The first Single-Database PIR was constructed in 1997 by Kushilevitz and Ostrovsky and since then Single-Database PIR has emerged as an important cryptographic primitive. For example, Single-Database PIR turned out to be intimately connected to collision-resistant hash functions, oblivious transfer and public-key encryptions with additional properties. In this survey, we give an overview of many of the constructions for Single-Database PIR (including an abstract construction based upon homomorphic encryption) and describe some of the connections of PIR to other primitives.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF PS
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Published elsewhere. The material presented in this paper appeared in proc. PKC-2007 (invited plenary talk).
Keywords: private information retrieval PIR public key encryption
Contact author(s): wskeith @ math ucla edu
History: 2007-02-20: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2007/059
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2007/059,
      author = {Rafail Ostrovsky and William E.  Skeith III},
      title = {A Survey of Single Database {PIR}: Techniques and Applications},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2007/059},
      year = {2007},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2007/059}
}