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Private Information Retrieval

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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Definition

Private information retrieval (PIR) protocol allows a user to retrieve the i-th bit of an n-bit database, without revealing to the database server the value of i. A trivial solution is for the user to retrieve the entire database, but this approach may incur enormous communication cost. A good PIR protocol is expected to have considerably lower communication complexity. Private block retrieval (PBR) is a natural and more practical extension of PIR in which, instead of retrieving only a single bit, the user retrieves a block of bits from the database.

Historical Background

PIR was first introduced by Chor, Goldreich, Kushilevitz, and Sudan [4] in 1995 in a multi-server setting, where the user retrieves information from multiple database servers, each of which has a copy of the same database. To ensure user privacy in the multi-server setting, the servers must be trusted not to collude. In [4], Chor et al. have shown that if only a single database is used, nbits must be...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science & Info Tech, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Xun Yi

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  1. Xun Yi
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Correspondence to Xun Yi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. DISTA, Università degli Studi dell’Insubria, Via Mazzini, 5, 21100, Varese, Italy

    Elena Ferrari

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Yi, X. (2017). Private Information Retrieval. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_80752-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_80752-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4899-7993-3

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