Cryptographers Are Getting Closer to Enabling Fully Private Internet Searches

Concocting a strategy that solves this problemknown as private information retrievalis a very useful building block in a number of privacy-preserving applications, saidDavid Wu, a cryptographer at the University of Texas, Austin..

After building their secret lookup scheme, the authors turned to the real-world goal of a private internet search, which is more complicated than pulling bits of information from a database, Wichs said..

The private lookup scheme on its own does allow for a version of private Google-like searching, but its extremely labor-intensive: You run Googles algorithm yourself and secretly pull data from the internet when necessary..

Wichs said a true search, where you send a request and sit back while the server collects the results, is really a target for a broader approach known as homomorphic encryption, which disguises data so that someone else can manipulate it without ever knowing anything about it...

But using their private lookup method as scaffolding, the authors constructed a new scheme which runs computations that are more like the programs we use every day, pulling information covertly without sweeping the whole internet..

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