Dear Vito,

I thought about that concern already. While I cannot provide you with a conclusive answer, many requests I did were below the 60 second timeout limit and are similar to the SPARQL examples users are encouraged to try out.

If this becomes a real thing, I would, however, prefer to host a SPARQL endpoint soley for this purpose (and with a better timeout) myself.

Best,
Darius


--- Original-Nachricht ---
Von: Vi to
Betreff: [Wikidata] Re: Private Information Retrieval
Datum: 29. Januar 2022, 14:24
An: Discussion list for the Wikidata project


Aren't similar methods too much resource intensive from Wikidata's perspective?

Vito

Il giorno sab 29 gen 2022 alle ore 13:44 Darius Runge <darius-runge@magenta.de> ha scritto:
Dear all,

I started using WikiData for Private Information Retrieval. This allows answering certain questions while maintaining a high degree of secrecy. Suppose you wanted to know when Einstein was born, but for some reason you must keep the fact that you want to know this a secret. In this case, we assume a threat model with perfect knowledge about the computer in use, not just that someone managed to log the Wikidata requests.

One solution would be to request a table of every human who ever won the Nobel Prize (this requires the common knowledge of Einstein being a winner of said) with the kind of Nobel Prize, date awarded, date of birth, date of death unless living, nationality etc. If we let this table scroll across the screen and read the required entry, there would be - as far as I can tell - no way to learn which entry (and how many of them) is of our interest.

I have written a simple PHP script that allows one to enter a SPARQL request and have it displayed as a scrolling table. Please be advised that this is in a very informal alpha state, and I am no professional Web Developer. It's a mere proof-of-concept, but feel free to try it out if the API quota lets you.

https://darius-runge.eu/otp/request.php

My question is, whether anyone of you might be interested in working with me on discussing practical implications of this method (how should requests be written to allow for the desired privacy?) or even making a better implementation of a tool that allows viewing the scrolling table of printing it out.

Feel free to reply to this mailing list entry or contact me privately with the postal or telecommunication data provided in the footer in case you don't want to discuss it in public.

Best,
Darius

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