The new method will ensure complete anonymity of your requests on the Internet.
Beware not only of what you share online, but also of what you search for. Information search can reveal your data, for example, a route search query reveals your location. This problem is at the center of the question in cryptography: how do I get information from a public database without revealing exactly what you were looking for?
Researchers have been trying to find a solution to this problem, known as "secure information retrieval", since the 1990s. The goal is to create an analog of a private Google search, where you can view data anonymously without significant calculations.
Now, three researchers have developed a long-awaited method for secure information retrieval and expanded it to create a more general privacy strategy. Their work, which won the Best Paper award at the annual Symposium on Computational Theory, overcomes an important theoretical barrier to creating a truly private search.
"This is a result that we all dreamed of, but didn't believe it was possible," says Vinod Vaikuntanathan, a cryptographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the work.
Previously, it was thought that the only solution was to scan the entire database with each search. However, this approach becomes inefficient as the amount of data increases.
Researchers have begun to suggest that it is possible to bypass a full scan by pre-processing the database. This allows the server to respond to the request by reading only a small part of the special structure. Daniel Wiechs, one of the authors of the new paper, initially tried to prove that such a scheme is impossible, but in 2017 his opinion changed.
Now scientists have found a way to efficiently process information on a single server, allowing users to receive data anonymously. "This is really more than we could have hoped for," says Yuval Yishai, a cryptographer at the Technion in Israel.
However, these methods are not yet ready for practical use: preprocessing is effective only for very large database sizes. However, Vaikuntanathan is confident that optimizing the approach can make secure search across large databases a reality.
Beware not only of what you share online, but also of what you search for. Information search can reveal your data, for example, a route search query reveals your location. This problem is at the center of the question in cryptography: how do I get information from a public database without revealing exactly what you were looking for?
Researchers have been trying to find a solution to this problem, known as "secure information retrieval", since the 1990s. The goal is to create an analog of a private Google search, where you can view data anonymously without significant calculations.
Now, three researchers have developed a long-awaited method for secure information retrieval and expanded it to create a more general privacy strategy. Their work, which won the Best Paper award at the annual Symposium on Computational Theory, overcomes an important theoretical barrier to creating a truly private search.
"This is a result that we all dreamed of, but didn't believe it was possible," says Vinod Vaikuntanathan, a cryptographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the work.
Previously, it was thought that the only solution was to scan the entire database with each search. However, this approach becomes inefficient as the amount of data increases.
Researchers have begun to suggest that it is possible to bypass a full scan by pre-processing the database. This allows the server to respond to the request by reading only a small part of the special structure. Daniel Wiechs, one of the authors of the new paper, initially tried to prove that such a scheme is impossible, but in 2017 his opinion changed.
Now scientists have found a way to efficiently process information on a single server, allowing users to receive data anonymously. "This is really more than we could have hoped for," says Yuval Yishai, a cryptographer at the Technion in Israel.
However, these methods are not yet ready for practical use: preprocessing is effective only for very large database sizes. However, Vaikuntanathan is confident that optimizing the approach can make secure search across large databases a reality.
