Eyal Kushilevitz
More info
- Affiliation
- Technion
- Known for
- Private information retrieval
The theorist who asked how to fetch a record from a database without the database learning which one, and then showed it works with a single server.
Private information retrieval (PIR) was formulated in 1995 by Benny Chor, Oded Goldreich, Kushilevitz and Madhu Sudan. Their solution needed several servers that promised not to collude, an assumption easier to write down than to enforce. In 1997 Kushilevitz and Rafail Ostrovsky showed that one server is enough if you are willing to trust a cryptographic assumption instead.
Outside cryptography he is known for the textbook Communication Complexity (1997), written with Noam Nisan and still the standard reference. PIR never went mass-market, but the idea resurfaces every time someone wants to check a password breach list or a contact book without revealing what they are looking for.