Towards Scalable and Practical Privacy Preserving Information Retrieval
Amr El Abbadi
Professor of Computer Science
University of California at Santa Barbara
Time and location: 26.09 (D1007) and 27.09 n(D1020) 16:15-18 (Delta center, Tartu)
Our goal in this tutorial is to demonstrate how private access of data can become a practical reality in the near future. Our focus is on supporting oblivious queries and thus hide any associated access patterns on both private and public data. The tutorial compromises of two lectures. To get the most out of the lectures, please try to attend both in sequence as the second lecture builds on material covered in the first lecture.
Initially, we will discuss privacy preserving management of private data. ORAM (Oblivious RAM) is one of the most popular approaches for supporting oblivious access to encrypted data. However, most existing ORAM datastores are inefficient and susceptible to failures. We will discuss recent concurrent, asynchronous and replication methods for providing efficient, fault-tolerant oblivious data storage.
The main focus of the tutorial will be on privately accessing public data. PIR (Private Information Retrieval) is the main mechanism proposed in recent years for private access of public data. However, current PIR proposals are inefficient especially with large data sets. We will motivate the problem by discussing a novel efficient PIR data structure to design a scalable infrastructure for voice communication that will hide meta-information. We will cover the basic concepts of PIR such as its types, construction, and critical building blocks, including homomorphic encryption. The solution to this challenge motivates and has significant ramifications on diverse data management problems such as designing scalable systems for oblivious search for documents from public repositories as well as private query processing over public databases.
Current PIR proposals usually require the server to consider data as an array of elements and clients retrieve data using an index into the array. This latter restriction limits the use of PIR in many practical settings, especially for key-value stores, where the client may be interested in a particular key, but does not know the exact location of the data at the server. We will discuss recent efforts to overcome these limitations, using Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), to improve the performance, scalability and expressiveness of privacy preserving queries on public data.
Biography
Amr El Abbadi is a Professor of Computer Science. He received his B. Eng. from Alexandria University, Egypt, and his Ph.D. from Cornell University. His research interests are in the fields of fault-tolerant distributed systems and databases, focusing recently on Cloud data management, blockchain based systems and privacy concerns. Prof. El Abbadi is an ACM Fellow, AAAS Fellow, and IEEE Fellow. He was Chair of the Computer Science Department at UCSB from 2007 to 2011. He served as Associate Graduate Dean at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 2021--2023. He has served as a journal editor for several database journals, including, The VLDB Journal, IEEE Transactions on Computers and The Computer Journal. He has been Program Chair for multiple database and distributed systems conferences, including most recently SIGMOD 2022. He currently serves on the executive committee of the IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering (TCDE) and was a board member of the VLDB Endowment from 2002 to 2008. In 2007, Prof. El Abbadi received the UCSB Senate Outstanding Mentorship Award for his excellence in mentoring graduate students. In 2013, his student, Sudipto Das received the SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award. Prof. El Abbadi is also a co-recipient of the Test of Time Award at EDBT/ICDT 2015. He has published over 350 articles in databases and distributed systems and has supervised over 40 PhD students.
Amr El Abbadi Homepage and Google Scholar
Host and local contact:
Prof. Jaak Vilo
email: vilo@ut.ee