Mathematical Sciences Seminar - New Combinatorial Techniques for User-Private Information Retrieval
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
No booking required
Domingo-Ferrer and Bras-Amoros introduced the idea of using combinatorial designs to hide the identity of users posting queries to a database. They suggested the use of certain structures known as "configurations'' and this theme has been pursued in several additional papers. In this talk, we discuss the problem of maintaining user anonymity even if a sequence of queries can be "linked'', e.g., due to being on a similar specialised topic. This notion of anonymity can be defined from the point of view of the database as well as from the point of view of other users in the scheme. We propose the use of balanced incomplete block designs as well as some related but more general types of designs in order to provide security in this context. This is joint work with Colleen Swanson.
Contact name:
Department of Economics, Mathematics and Statistics