CrySP Speaker Series on Privacy • Private Information Retrieval: Improvements and Limitations

Please note: This CrySP Speaker Series on Privacy talk will take place in DC 1302 and online.

Kevin Yeo
Research Engineering Manager, Google
PhD candidate, Columbia University

Private information retrieval (PIR) is a very promising cryptographic tool that enables privacy-preserving data querying that has endless implications to real-world applications. Unfortunately, PIR’s high cost remains a hindrance in widespread adoption.

In this talk, I cover three PIR topics. First, I will motivate the importance of PIR by walking through a real-world use case at Google deployed today. Next, I will present recent improvements to the concrete efficiency for keyword and batch PIR. Finally, I will discuss recent developments in PIR with preprocessing and explain some limitations and lower bounds to the approach.

Bio: Kevin Yeo is a research engineering manager at Google NYC in the Private Computing group as well as a PhD student at Columbia University in the CS theory group. His research interests include cryptography, security, privacy and data structures spanning from understanding theoretical limits to building large-scale systems with strong privacy guarantees.

His work has received two USENIX Security distinguished paper awards (2019 & 2023). Kevin’s research, including Password Checkup and Private Set Membership, has been deployed to billions of users across Android and Chrome and Kevin’s work has also influenced IETF standards for blind signatures.

To attend this talk in person, please go to DC 1302. You can also attend virtually using Zoom at https://uwaterloo.zoom.us/j/95769795197.