Authors:
Bolam Kang
;
Sung Cheol Goh
and
Myungsun Kim
Affiliation:
The University of Suwon, Korea, Republic of
Keyword(s):
Private web search (PWS), Secret sharing, Public-key encryption, Round efficiency.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Information and Systems Security
;
Privacy Enhancing Technologies
Abstract:
Web searches are increasingly becoming essential activites because they are often the most effective and
convenient way of finding information. However, a web search can be a threat to the privacy of users because
their queries may reveal sensitive information. Private web search (PWS) solutions allow users to find
information on the Internet while preserving their privacy. According to their underlying technology, existing
PWS solutions can be divided into three types: Proxy-based solutions, Obfuscation-based solutions, and
Cryptography-based solutions. Among them, cryptography-based PWS (CB-PWS) systems are particularly
interesting because they provide strong privacy guarantees.
In this paper, we present a constant-round CB-PWS protocol that preserves computational efficiency compared
to known CB-PWS systems. To prove these arguments, we first analyze the efficiency of our protocol.
According to our analysis, our protocol simply requires 3n modular exponentiations for n users. In p
articular,
our protocol is a 5-round protocol that requires O(n) communication complexity. In addition, evaluating
the security of our protocol shows that our construction is comparable to similar solutions in terms of user
privacy.
(More)