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yorwbalast Friday at 10:30 AM1 replyview on HN

They do not explicitly state this fact, but they link to the homomorphic encryption scheme they're using, which works like this. To perform an operation between a plaintext value and an encrypted value, you first encrypt the plaintext with the public key and then you can do your operation on the encrypted values to get the encrypted output.

Moreover, even if the details were slightly different, a scheme that reveals absolutely no information about the query while interacting with a database always needs to do a full scan. If some parts remain unread depending on the query, this tells you what the query wasn't. If you're okay with revealing some information, you can also hash the query and take a short prefix of the hash with many colliders, then only scan values with the same hash prefix. This is how browsers typically do safe browsing lookups, but by downloading that subset of the database instead of doing the comparison homomorphically on the server.


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ElFitzlast Friday at 11:34 AM

Is that what they mean in the Wally paper post by

> In previous private search systems, for each client query, the server must perform at least one expensive cryptographic operation per database entry.

?

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