Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have presented a search method that protects
Searching the web leads to the disclosure of information,which the user would like to keep secret. For example, when someone searches for medical symptoms or the name of an illness online, health data is shared with the search engine, hundreds of advertisers, and company partners.
To avoid data disclosure, MIT proposeduse a new search method: it forms a query in such a way that even the server on which the database is located does not know what the user was looking for.
Theoretically, to hide the interest of the user is quitesimple: it is enough to execute queries to all elements of the database, the developers explain. The problem is that when there are millions or even billions of records in the database, this will take a significant amount of time.
The proposed search technology is based onSimple PIR protocol. The preprocessing step in this case creates a data structure containing compressed information about the contents of the database, which the client loads before sending the request. This structure is a hint to the client about what is in the database. After that, you can execute queries on all elements of one of the segments of the structure.
Programmers have shown that if you usethis approach several times (i.e. create a compressed hint for the hint, and so on) can avoid the significant network load associated with the transfer of the "hint" from the server to the user and still ensure the anonymity of the search. At the same time, search speed is increased by 30 times compared to other private search solutions.
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