Re: Private Information Retrieval (PIR) as a C/C++ Aggregate Extension

Hi!

> 12 сент. 2021 г., в 18:02, Private Information Retrieval(PIR) <postgresql-pir(at)pm(dot)me> написал(а):
>
> I've created a Postgresql C/C++ Aggregate Extension implementing Private Information Retrieval (PIR) using Homomorphic Encryption. The open sourced version can be found here: https://github.com/ReverseControl/MuchPIR .
>
> In essence, with PIR we can retrieve data from any row in a table without revealing to the server doing the search which row data was retrieved, or whether the data was found at all.
>
> I am seeking feedback from the postgres community on this extension. Is it something of interest? Is it something anyone would like to contribute to and make better? Is there similar work already publicly available? Any reference would be greatly appreciated.

PIR seem to be interesting functionality.
As far as I understand in terms of a database PIR is special kind of an aggregator, which extracts some part of data unknown to server.

One question came to my mind. Can we limit the amount of extracted data? It makes sense to protect the database from copy.

Also you may be interested in differential privacy data exploration [0,1]. This is a kind of data aggregation which protects data from deducing single row by means of aggregation. Implementation could be resemblant to MuchPIR.

Thanks!

Best regards, Andrey Borodin.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy
[1] https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~ilyas/papers/GeSIGMOD2019.pdf