Installation of Blindstore

[hardik gajera]

Hello everyone,

I am a doctoral student at DA-IICT, Gandhinagar, India. I am studying and analysing Private Information Retrieval (PIR) systems based on different homomorphic encryptions. Few days back I came across the Blindstore and I noticed that it uses PIR based on V-DGHV. I am analysing this scheme and I want to know how the actual implementation of this PIR scheme works. So I started implementing Blindstore in ubuntu 13.10. I have successfully installed event monitor, libScarab, pyscarab and blindstore-demo. While installing Blindstore, I got stuck in HElib. Here is the error message:

>hardik@zext-VGN-CS22GH-B:~/Desktop/Blindstore/blindstore/lib/libshe/lib/HElib/src$ make

 HElib requires NTL version 6.1.0 or higher, see http://shoup.net/ntl <http://shoup.net/ntl> 
 If you get compilation errors, try to add/remove -std=c++11 in Makefile*

 g++ -g -O2 -Wfatal-errors -Wshadow -Wall -I/usr/local/include -fPIC -c polyEval.cpp
 polyEval.cpp: In function 'void polyEval(Ctxt&, const NTL::Vec<Ctxt>&,const Ctxt&)':
 polyEval.cpp:59:40: error: no matching function for call to 'NTL::Vec<Ctxt>::Vec(const NTL::INIT_SIZE_STRUCT&, long int, const Ctxt&)'
    Vec<Ctxt> powers(INIT_SIZE, logD+1, x);
                                         ^ 
 compilation terminated due to -Wfatal-errors. 
 make: *** [polyEval.o] Error 1 

Please help me in resolving this problem.

Thanks.

Regards
Hardik Gajera

P.S: I have installed ntl-6.1.0.

[Bogdan Kulynych]

Hello Hardik,

It looks you need to get the latest version of HElib and the latest version of NTL as per this issue: https://github.com/shaih/HElib/issues/59 .

Anyway, the code from the _blindstore_ repository you're trying to install doesn't use HElib even though there's HElib in the lib directory; it uses libscarab, the experimental C implementation of SV2011 FHE. Sorry, the codebase is a bit of mess. Please see github.com/bogdan-kulynych/libshe for implementation of V-DGHV.

Regards,

Bogdan

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[hardik gajera]

Hello Bogdan,

Thanks for the info. We have ignored the HElib for now. We have implemented blindstore-demo and blindstore successfully. As described in the directory of blindstore-demo, we started meteor (localhost:3000) but in next step, it says we need to run server_script.py and client_script.py from blindstore directory. There are no such script files in blindstore. We then checked blindtore-old-scarab directory. It has client.py and server.py files. So we have implemented this directory alongside of blindstore and tried to run server.py file but it runs on 127.0.0.1:5000. It is not able to communicate with meteor. Please help us in resolving this issue.

Thanks.

Regards,

Hardik

[Bogdan Kulynych]

Hi Hardik,

Sorry, last time I was wrong. I was talking about the old working blindstore prototype blindstore-old-scarab. The 'blindstore' repo is a stub. From the README:

Currently this repo is a stub.

• For the core cryptography implementation, see libshe.
• For a working proof of concept of the Blindstore concept, please see the blindstore-old-scarab repository. The implementation there is based on another encryption scheme.

This repo will contain an implementation of Blindstore in C++ based on the V-DGHV scheme of somewhat homomorphic encryption (libshe) presented in [1].

Blindstore-demo was just a demo for the audience for the sake of presentation. It was supposed to work with old prototype: https://github.com/blindstore/blindstore-old-scarab/tree/demo at demo branch. It looked nice, but you probably wanted to check the timings, etc. Then you could look at https://github.com/blindstore/blindstore-old-scarab/blob/master/pir.py . Or follow the README here: https://github.com/blindstore/blindstore-old-scarab/ .

If you look for practicality, it's not there yet. If you're interested in timing, I'll hint you the SV-FHE-based prototype using libscarab was insanely slow, like couple of seconds to retrieve a record from an 3-record database. The V-DGHV takes seconds for database of 1000 records.

Again, the main work was being done recently in https://github.com/bogdan-kulynych/libshe

Thanks, we probably need to clean up the organization repos.

Regards

Bogdan

[Ainish Dave]

Hi Bogdan,

I am currently working with Hardik on PIR schemes. We setup the Blindstore on our system. As you mentioned, 'pir.py' file is taking too long to retrieve the result (much more than 2 seconds on our system as a matter of fact). Now as you mentioned that currently the work is being done in 'libshe', which contains the code in 'C'. So, we were thinking if we could write a file in C, analogous to the one in python (i.e. pir.py). Will it be helpful in improving the retrieval time?

Regards,
Ainish

[Bogdan Kulynych]

Yes, sure.

I actually have a draft of a benchmark similar to 'pir.py' on my local computer for libshe. I can push it within a week. Yes, it would be faster, because 'pir.py' uses SV-FHE.

Regards,

Bogdan

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[Bogdan Kulynych]

Hi Hardik, Ainish,

I have added PIR benchmark to libshe: https://github.com/bogdan-kulynych/libshe/blob/master/benchmarks/pir.cpp

Please follow the README to install and build properly. Feel free to tweak benchmark parameters. VDGHV is very slow, I'm working on adding HElib backend right now.

Regards,

Bogdan