NSF Award
2326312
Many privacy-preserving applications such as anonymous messaging, private database querying, encrypted search, and privacy-preserving advertising require implementing protocols that allow a client to read or write to a database (hosted by one or more servers) without revealing to the servers which item in the database was read/written. To do so, many applications make use of an important cryptographic primitive called private information retrieval (PIR), which allows clients to retrieve values from an untrusted data storage such that the storage servers do not learn anything about which value is being retrieved. When considered for practical usage, existing approaches have several significant drawbacks in terms of communication, storage, and computation efficiency, as well as fault tolerance. This project’s novelties are to develop new PIR protocols for both private reads and writes to a database hosted on multiple servers, and to simultaneously achieve efficiency in communication and storage overheads, as well as being fault-tolerant against fail-stop and Byzantine failures. This project’s broader significance and importance are to improve important aspects of private information retrieval via algorithmic techniques, which can be used in real world applications that leverage PIR, and make these applications more efficient, scalable, and practical.<br/><br/>The team of researchers plan to address the research question in two thrusts. The first thrust focuses on designing fault-tolerant, communication-efficient distributed point function schemes, which will help the design of queries that can be later used for PIR reads/writes. The second thrust will build upon the distributed point function designs from the first thrust to create end-to-end PIR protocols for enabling oblivious reads and writes over erasure-coded storage. The team is planning to open source the framework for other researchers and educators.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
