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Cool idea. When I read the title I thought that maybe they have discovered a practical private information retrieval method or some oblivious transfer-based met

Cool idea. When I read the title I thought that maybe they have discovered a practical private information retrieval method or some oblivious transfer-based method after all since their 2014 blog post (well, they kinda do something like that with oblivious accesses to the RAM I guess), but using the secure enclaves for running verifiable code seems like a very pragmatic and creative solution too. Granted, how secure those enclaves against state-level attackers also remains to be seen (that recent attack on ARM Trustzone was pretty cool and effective), but it surely is an improvement after all if you want some defense in depth.

betterunix2 9y ago
"practical private information retrieval" For single-server PIR that is almost certainly an impossibility, since no matter what sort of techniques you use you must scan the entire database on every request (there may be some batching that can be done if several requests are from the same user, but if you have millions of users that is not terribly helpful). Multi-server PIR is already practical, but deployment is a bit difficult: who will be the other server? How will you ensure the other server's database is synchronized with yours?