Central Concerns and Questions
User privacy is a major security concern in network and database services. Although encryption techniques may help to protect the confidentiality of user query, data and results, it is more challenging to prevent an adversary from inferring information by observing users' access patterns. 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 study innovate cryptographic techniques to preserve the access pattern privacy.
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] E. De Cristofaro, X. Ding and G. Tsudik, Privacy-Preserving Querying in Sensor Networks , Proceedings of the 18th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), August 2009, San Francisco, USA.
[2] Yanjiang Yang, Xuhua Ding, Robert H. Deng and Feng Bao. An Efficient PIR Construction Using Trusted Hardware. Proceedings of the 11th Information Security Conference, 2008, Taiwan .
[3] Shuhong Wang, Xuhua Ding, Robert H. Deng and Feng 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 .
Projects, Presentations and Posters
- Xuhua Ding, Private information retrieval using trusted hardware (presentation)
- Xuhua Ding, Towards practical information retrieval (poster)
Collaborations and Industry Linkages
- Institute for Infocomm Research
