摘要 |
A method and system for privately retrieving selected information from a database. The method includes determining, at a server, a first commodity and a second commodity, communicating the first commodity to an inquiring processor and the second commodity to the database, and retrieving the selected information from the database based on the first commodity and the second commodity such that the selected information is not revealed to the database. The first and second commodities may, for example, include a random address in the database and a private information retrieval query for encoding the random address, respectively. The inquiring processor determines an address offset based on the random address and the address of selected information in the database, and sends the address offset to the database. The database cyclically shift its contents according the address offset, and executes the query on the cyclically shifted contents. The database then sends the result of the query to the inquiring processor, which extracts from the result the selected information in the database.
|