A distributed scheme for row-based computational private information retrieval

摘要

Private information retrieval (PIR) is a technique for clients to retrieve data from database while hiding the identity of data. Existing PIR schemes are impractical because of the expensive cost for complete privacy. In this paper, we propose a flexible, distributed scheme for PIR. First, a new protocol row-based computational PIR (Robac-PIR) is designed to make a trade-off between privacy and efficiency. Second, we apply Robac-PIR in a distributed system to further lower the computational cost. We implement the scheme, and the results show it has a good performance and can also provide the trade-off. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.