Industrial Feasibility of Private Information Retrieval

A popular security problem in database management is how to guarantee to a querying party that the database owner will not learn anything about the data that is retrieved --- a problem known as Private Information Retrieval (PIR). While a variety of PIR schemes are known, they are rarely considered for practical use cases yet. We investigate the feasibility of PIR in the telecommunications world to open up data of carriers to external parties. To this end, we first provide a comparative survey of the current PIR state of the art (including ORAM schemes as a generalized concept) as well as implementation and analysis of two PIR schemes for the considered use case. While an overall conclusion is that PIR techniques are not too far away from practical use in specific cases, we see ORAM as a more suitable candidate for further R\&D investment