A PIR Scheme to Improve the Computation Cost on the Client-Side of Smartphone Applications

Abstract

We present an approach to retrieve data from the database by using Private Information Retrieval (PIR). PIR is a cryptographic database technique that solves the seemingly impossible problem of allowing the user to query a database while the content of the user's query is protected from the database server. Different types of PIR-based approaches have been proposed during the last two decades. The common criticism against PIR approaches is that the computational overhead is not suitable for the smartphones' hardware with limited resources and therefore, they are not practical. The main focus of this paper is to reduce the computation cost of decoding the received response(s) from the database on the client side to make PIR more practical for the smartphone applications.