[Noisebridge-discuss] Distributed computing and storage (with some major caveats)

[David Molnar]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 5:40 PM, Ian <ian at slumbrparty.com> wrote:

> sorry it took me so long to respond. the most prominent requirement
> you touched on was encrypting the data stored and also being able to
> search it. this is possible.
>
> there is a crypto thing called Public Information Retrieval. it lets
> you do just that. if you google ""Public Information Retrieval"
> encryption", you'll find what you're looking for. you can also do an


I haven't heard of "Public Information Retrieval" in this context and google
didn't turn up anything informative. I have heard of a cryptographic
primitive called "Private Information Retrieval." Is that what you meant?
There is a page covering recent research on the subject here:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/pir/pir.html

and code implementing a variant of single server private information
retrieval here
http://percy.sourceforge.net/

Note that private information retrieval is somewhat different from searching
encrypted data. In private information retrieval, Alice has published a list
of data items she holds. Bob wants to retrieve one of these data items
without revealing which one in particular to Alice. This isn't searching in
the traditional sense of looking for keywords. For searching on encrypted
data there's a parallel strain of work, starting here:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/papers/se.pdf

I don't know of any code implementing the techniques in that paper or its
follow ups, but this page is a place to watch for such code (or contribute
your own should you write any)
http://acsc.csl.sri.com/

-David Molnar
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