Protecting the Privacy of Users in Retrieving Valuable Information by a PIR Scheme with Mutual Authentication by RSA Signature Algorithm

While the users retrieve valuable information on the internet, the protection of users´ privacy from a database server was not considered feasible until the private information retrieval (PIR) problem was stated and solved. A PIR scheme allows a user to retrieve a data item from an online database while hiding the identity of the item from a database server. In this paper, a new PIR scheme combined with mutual authentication by RSA signature algorithm for protecting the privacy of users is proposed. Using only one server and including the mutual authentication process in the proposed scheme, it is more secure and more practical in the real application compared with previous PIR solutions.