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Practical PIR for electronic commerce

Published: 17 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

We extend Goldberg's multi-server information-theoretic private information retrieval (PIR) with a suite of protocols for privacy-preserving e-commerce. Our first protocol adds support for single-payee tiered pricing, wherein users purchase database records without revealing the indices or prices of those records. Tiered pricing lets the seller set prices based on each user's status within the system; e.g., non-members may pay full price while members may receive a discounted rate. We then extend tiered pricing to support group-based access control lists with record-level granularity; this allows the servers to set access rights based on users' price tiers. Next, we show how to do some basic bookkeeping to implement a novel top-K replication strategy that enables the servers to construct bestsellers lists, which facilitate faster retrieval for these most popular records. Finally, we build on our bookkeeping functionality to support multiple payees, thus enabling several sellers to offer their digital goods through a common database while enabling the database servers to determine to what portion of revenues each seller is entitled. Our protocols maintain user anonymity in addition to query privacy; that is, queries do not leak information about the index or price of the record a user purchases, the price tier according to which the user pays, the user's remaining balance, or even whether the user has ever queried the database before. No other priced PIR or oblivious transfer protocol supports tiered pricing, access control lists, multiple payees, or top-K replication, whereas ours supports all of these features while preserving PIR's sublinear communication complexity. We have implemented our protocols as an add-on to Percy++, an open source implementation of Goldberg's PIR scheme. Measurements indicate that our protocols are practical for deployment in real-world e-commerce applications.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CCS '11: Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
October 2011
742 pages
ISBN:9781450309486
DOI:10.1145/2046707
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 17 October 2011

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Author Tags

  1. access control
  2. e-commerce
  3. pets
  4. pir
  5. privacy-enhancing technologies
  6. private information retrieval
  7. zero-knowledge proofs

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  • (2022)INSPIREProceedings of the 49th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture10.1145/3470496.3527433(102-115)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2022
  • (2022)Privacy in targeted advertising on mobile devices: a surveyInternational Journal of Information Security10.1007/s10207-022-00655-x22:3(647-678)Online publication date: 24-Dec-2022
  • (2022)Single-Server Private Information Retrieval with Sublinear Amortized TimeAdvances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 202210.1007/978-3-031-07085-3_1(3-33)Online publication date: 25-May-2022
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