Private information retrieval from large-scale public data repositories

As more data moves to the cloud, privacy protection is becoming increasingly crucial in the field of databases. While much of the research in this area has focused on encryption-based solutions for _private_ databases, relatively little attention has been paid to provide privacy for querying _public_ or server-controlled databases where a user cannot encrypt the data. In this talk, I will discuss this underserved area and share recent results on private point queries over public key-value databases. I will also discuss how this problem builds on and is related to an area in cryptography called Private Information Retrieval or PIR. I will conclude my talk with open problems in this area and potential directions for future research.