Retrieving information from databases pulls a constant activity on the daily routine, concurrently, its privacy concern when it comes to sensitive data develop a parallel problem. Private information retrieval (PIR) is a privacy protocol that allows a user to download a required message from a set of messages stored in a database without revealing the index of the required message to the databases.
In other words, PIR is protocol in which from one side, a possibly untrusted server holds a public database $DB$ with $N$ records. On the other side, a client wants to query for record $i \in {0 \cdots N-1}$, without letting the server learn the queried item they are looking up (and, hence, learning the value $v$ associated with $i$ they are interested in). A naive solution involves the client locally downloading the whole $DB$, but that can be expensive: the goal of PIR is to both preserve privacy and be more efficient than the total cost of downloading the whole $DB$. There are many proposed solutions for this problem, and for this Capstone Project, we will explore the ones that uses FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) as cryptographic primitive.
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