Central Concerns and Questions

Hiding user query pattern information is a generic privacy notion, since it applies to almost every database service model. Private information retrieval (PIR) is the cryptographic primitive addressing this issue. Unfortunately, although PIR has been actively investigated for a decade, only theoretical constructions have been proposed and none of them is in the realm of practice due to their prohibitively high computational cost. The mission of our research on this topic is to design practical PIR schemes.

Emerging Ideas and Initiatives

To break the O(n) computation boundary of traditional PIR schemes, we introduce trusted computing techniques into the existing model. With a trusted component embedded in the database server, our new PIR scheme avoids expensive cryptographic computations and reduces communication cost.

Selected Publications

[1] S. Wang, X. Ding, R. H. Deng and F. Bao. Private Information Retrieval Using Trusted Hardware. Proceedings of the 11th Enropean Symposium on Research in Computer Security, LNCS 4189, Pages 49-64, September 2006, Hamburg, Germany.

[2] Y. Yang, X. Ding, R. H. Deng and F. Bao. An Efficient PIR Construction Using Trusted Hardware. Proceedings of the 11th Information Security Conference, 2008, Taiwan.

Projects, Presentations and Posters

1. X. Ding, Private information r etrieval using trusted hardware (presentation)
2. X. Ding, Towards practical information retrieval (poster)

Collaborations and Industry Linkages

1. Institute for Infocomm Research