Talk
What is.. private information retrieval?
Talk by Dr. Karan Khathuria
Date: 08.12.20 Time: 17.30 - 18.30 Room:
Have you ever wondered about how your privacy is maintained when you are accessing a public database (like Netflix or stock markets)? and what kind of request do you send to the server to access a specific file, without letting the server know which file is requested? In this talk, we will address these questions. In order to ensure that not even the owner of the database can determine the files that the user has requested, the communication between the two parties (the server and the user) is done via private information retrieval (PIR) schemes. The main aim of this talk is to introduce PIR schemes from a mathematical point of view and to discuss the known PIR schemes for different types of database settings (single-server or multiple-server). Some keywords that illustrate the kind of mathematics we will see in this talk: coding theory (= linear algebra + finite rings), complexity theory, quadratic residues, lattice theory, etc.