Poshida, a protocol for private information retrieval

Web Search Engines are the easy source to get data from Internet. WSE retrieve the information from the ocean of data according to the user generated queries. In return the WSE records the queries to build the user profile and retrieves the personalize search results. WSE sells the query log to marketing companies to generate revenue. This poses a threat to user privacy. In 2006 AOL released query log for research purpose but those logs were not properly anonymized, lead to the discovery of users. Performing private web search and achieving privacy is the active area of research. Many technique has been proposed to hide the identity of users from the WSE, However state of the art scheme is yet to device to privately retrieve information from WSE. This paper proposes a new protocol to obfuscate the user profile which is maintained by WSE. Profile Exposure level is used to measure the level of privacy a user achieve from WSE. Results show the protocol hides 50 percent of user profile at first degree 70% at second, 77% at third and more than 85% at fourth degree.

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