Trade-offs in Private Search

Encrypted search — performing queries on protected data — is a well researched problem. However, existing solutions have inherent inefficiency that raises questions of practicality. Here, we step back from the goal of achieving maximal privacy guarantees in an encrypted search scenario to consider efficiency as a priority. We propose a privacy framework for search that allows tuning and optimization of the tradeoffs between privacy and efficiency. As an instantiation of the privacy framework we introduce a tunable search system based on the SADS scheme and provide detailed measurements demonstrating the tradeoffs of the constructed system. We also analyze other existing encrypted search schemes with respect to this framework. We further propose a protocol that addresses the challenge of document content retrieval in a search setting with relaxed privacy requirements.