Private Information Retrieval Using Trusted Hardware

Many theoretical PIR (Private Information Retrieval) constructions have been proposed in the past years. Though information theoretically secure, most of them are impractical to deploy due to the prohibitively high communication and computation complexity. The recent trend in outsourcing databases fuels the research on practical PIR schemes. In this paper, we propose a new PIR system by making use of trusted hardware. Our system is proven to be information theoretically secure. Furthermore, we derive the computation complexity lower bound for hardware-based PIR schemes and show that our construction meets the lower bounds for both the communication and computation costs, respectively.