Protecting the privacy of users in e-commerce environment

In e-commerce, the protection of users' privacy from a server has not been considered feasible until the private information retrieval (PIR) problem was stated and solved recently. A PIR scheme allows a user to retrieve data items from an online database while hiding the identity of the items from a database server. PIR schemes were studied in depth since the subject was first introduced by Chor et al. in 1995. In this paper, we propose a PIR scheme of one server (OS-PIR) for protecting the privacy of users. It is more practical in real e-commerce environment compared with previous PIR solutions. In addition, we give a security proof to our scheme and comparisons to other PIR schemes.