Keyword search and oblivious pseudorandom functions

We study the problem of privacy-preserving access to a database. Particularly, we consider the problem of privacy-preserving keyword search (KS), where records in the database are accessed according to their associated keywords and where we care for the privacy of both the client and the server. We provide efficient solutions for various settings of KS, based either on specific assumptions or on general primitives (mainly oblivious transfer). Our general solutions rely on a new connection between KS and the oblivious evaluation of pseudorandom functions (OPRFs). We therefore study both the definition and construction of OPRFs and, as a corollary, give improved constructions of OPRFs that may be of independent interest.