Comment by blintz
6 months ago
There has been a theoretical breakthrough that makes search a O(log n) problem, actually, (https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1703) but it is pretty impractical (and not getting much faster).
6 months ago
There has been a theoretical breakthrough that makes search a O(log n) problem, actually, (https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1703) but it is pretty impractical (and not getting much faster).
Good point. Note however that PIR is a rather restricted form of search (e.g., with no privacy for the server), but even so, DEPIR has polylog(n) queries (not log n), and requires superlinear preprocessing and a polynomial blowup in the size of the database. I think recent concrete estimates are around a petabyte of storage for a database of 2^20 words. So as you say, pretty impractical.