How to retrieve priced data

TL;DR

This paper proposes a scheme enabling users to keep their purchase choices secret when buying priced digital goods from databases, addressing privacy concerns with goods of varying prices.

Contribution

It introduces a novel scheme that extends oblivious transfer protocols to handle priced digital goods, enhancing privacy in database transactions.

Findings

The scheme effectively hides user choices with different priced goods.

It maintains privacy even when goods have varying prices.

The approach improves upon existing oblivious transfer methods.

Abstract

Databases are an indispensable resource for retrieving up-to-date information. However, curious database operators may be able to find out the users' interests when the users buy something from the database. For these cases, if the digital goods have the identical prices, then a $k$-out-of-$n$ oblivious transfer protocol could help the users to hide their choices, but when the goods have different prices, this would not work. In this paper, we propose a scheme to help users to keep their choices secret when buying priced digital goods from databases.