The field is witnessing a significant shift towards information-theoretic approaches to privacy and similarity search. Recent research has established a mathematical equivalence between witness-based similarity systems and Shannon's information theory, revealing that semantic similarity has physical units and search is communication over a noisy channel. Meanwhile, private information retrieval protocols are being developed to enable secure and efficient retrieval of information from databases. Noteworthy papers in this area include:
- The Information Theory of Similarity, which establishes a precise mathematical equivalence between witness-based similarity systems and Shannon's information theory.
- A Unified Framework for Constructing Information-Theoretic Private Information Retrieval, which proposes a new discrete structure for constructing IT-PIR protocols.
- IVE: An Accelerator for Single-Server Private Information Retrieval Using Versatile Processing Elements, which achieves up to 1,275x higher throughput compared to prior PIR hardware solutions.