Single-Database Private Information Retrieval Schemes : Overview, Performance Study, and Usage with Statistical Databases

This paper presents an overview of the current single-database private information retrieval (PIR) schemes and proposes to explore the usage of these protocols with statistical databases. The vicinity of this research field with the one of Oblivious Transfer, and the different performance measures used for the last few years have resulted in re-discoveries and contradictory comparisons of performance in different publications. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we present the different schemes through the innovations they have brought to this field of research, which gives a global view of the evolution since the first of these schemes was presented by Kushilevitz and Ostrovsky in 1997. We know of no other survey of the current PIR protocols. We also compare the most representative of these schemes with a single set of communication performance measures. When compared to the usage of global communication cost as a single measure, we assert that this set simplifies the evaluation of the cost of using PIR and reveals the best adapted scheme to each situation. We conclude this overview and performance study by introducing some important issues resulting from PIR usage with statistical databases and highlighting some directions for further research.

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