Security News > 2022 > December > FrodoPIR: New Privacy-Focused Database Querying System

The developers behind the Brave open-source web browser have revealed a new privacy-preserving data querying and retrieval system called FrodoPIR. The idea, the company said, is to use the technology to build out a wide range of use cases such as safe browsing, checking passwords against breached databases, certificate revocation checks, and streaming, among others.

The scheme is called FrodoPIR because "The client can perform hidden queries to the server, just as Frodo remained hidden from Sauron," a reference to the characters from oJ. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

A common problem afflicting such methods is that they are "Expensive in terms of either bandwidth, or in the amount of time taken to process each client query," making them prohibitive for real-world deployments.

The server subsequently opts to return a positive or negative value depending on whether or not the query is found in the database without learning what the user is actually querying for.

"In terms of performance for a database of 1 million KB elements, FrodoPIR requires 3.6x, and financial costs are ~$1 for answering client queries," Brave said in a GitHub description of the project.

The transpiler, aka source-to-source compiler or translator, is designed to run computation-based queries on encrypted information sans any access to personally identifiable data.

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2022/12/frodopir-new-privacy-focused-database.html