Please note: This seminar will take place in DC 1302.
Weiran Liu, Staff Security Engineer
Alibaba Group
Keyword Private Information Retrieval (Keyword PIR) enables private queries on public key-value databases. Unlike standard index-based PIR, keyword PIR presents greater challenges, since the query’s position within the database is unknown and the domain of keywords is vast. The key insight to obtain efficient keyword PIR is to construct an efficient and compact key-to-index mapping, thereby reducing the keyword PIR problem to standard PIR.
In this talk, I will introduce the basic concept of (Keyword) PIR, the state-of-the-art (SOTA) index/keyword PIR constructions based on Learning With Error (LWE) assumptions, and our new constructions on more efficient Keyword PIR. Notably, our construction includes several advanced data structures coming from the database field, i.e., binary fuse filter and learned index, demonstrating that new data structures can have potential applications in crypto primitives.
Bio: Weiran Liu received his B.S. degree in Electronic Information and Engineering from Beihang University, China, in 2012 and his Ph.D. degree in Information and Communication Engineering from Beihang University, China, in 2017. He is currently a staff security engineer at the Department of Data Technology and Products, Alibaba Group, China.
His main areas of interest include applied cryptography, fully homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation, and differential privacy. He has published several works on top-tier conferences such as USENIX Security, ACM CCS, SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, and PKC. He also contributed several books on the data security field, including “The Greate Crypto,” “A Pragmatic Introduction to Secure Multi-Party Computation (Chinese version),” and “Programming Differential Privacy (Chinese version).” He served as reviewer/extended reviewer for top-tier international conferences across different fields of studies, including ICML, NIPS, ICLR, and ASIACRYPT.