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Blind Librarian

A PoC showcasing private information retrieval and the value it can provide

Blind Librarian

Created At

ETHGlobal New York

Winner of

🥈 Sunscreen — Best Innovation on Parasol

Project Description

**This project was ambitious to go pretty much solo on and I definitely didn't finish even half of what I wanted to but I learned a ton!

The goal for the project was to test a couple new tech items together: Sunscreen FHE compiler on a rust server WalletConnect Notify API Safe (Core & AA kit)

How was I going to do this? I wanted to do a use case that showed off the need for PIR in a toy example that could be carried over to real life systems.

The blind librarian project consists of 3 characters: The librarian The library member The library system

The premise of the blind librarian project is to drive the point home that there is risk of losing credible neutrality in a world without PIR.

I showcase this by having a librarian that can see in plaintext what books people were requesting to fetch from the library and the librarian could refuse if they didn't like the person or the content.

By adding client side encryption on the library member's side and server side FHE PIR to fetch the book, a user could get their books and a librarian could show credible neutrality in fetching books.

As one may imagine -- this idea could be applied to Proposer-Builders (who commonly don't include each other in blocks produced) all the way to social media feeds.

How it's Made

The blind librarian project consists of 3 characters and their components as below: The librarian

  • UX predominantly from WalletConnect to get notified of incoming book requests The library member
  • UX predominantly from Safe to create their own web3 wallet
  • client side encryption wasm from rust from library system The library system
  • Rust web server
  • integrated with Sunscreen's FHE compiler for PIR
  • integrated with WalletConnect for notifications
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