Hi Tim, Disclaimer: As a pure mathematician by training, I'm bent towards the theoretic mathematical explanations of PIR. :)
PIR has 'historically' (it's only 20 yrs or so old) been a theoretic discipline which is why you see a theoretic/academic treatment in the literature. The aim of Pirk is to change this -- to move PIR from the purely theoretic and into the practical and scalable. The Wideskies paper and it's citations are good starting places for understanding the first base algorithm of Pirk and they do go into all of the detail. The original Paillier paper is also linked from the website and it contains some beautiful proofs regarding the hows-and-whys of the crypto. A good basis in abstract algebra (and a cursory bit of number theory) is necessary to really understand why things work they way that they do here -- my favorite algebra book is 'Algebra' by Micheal Artin. I am working on some slides in which I will explain the Wideskies algorithm (and some PIR primitives) at a high level, but, honestly, without diving deeply into the mathematics, folks will mostly have to press the 'I Believe' button... If we are in the same room at some point, I am happy to try and walk you through the math. Anyone else want to weigh in here? Thanks! Ellison Anne On Tue, Aug 9, 2016 at 10:45 AM, Tim Ellison <[email protected]> wrote: > Could folks recommend some reading material to help me become more > familiar with the principles behind Pirk's PIR? > > Many of the publications I have found on-line are academic reviews > (information theoretic vs. computational PIR, trading off communication > and processing complexity, etc), or deep mathematical proofs of > efficient algorithms (I'm looking at you Wideskies ;-) > > I'm prepared to take on trust that the maths can be proven, but I'm > looking for a bit more than "you send an encrypted query, and we send > you an encrypted result". I'm looking for the next level of detail. > > How do you recommend I learn more about what is happening between the > various players in Pirk's PIR system? > > Regards, > Tim >
