Berlin

Web search has become an integral part of our lives and we use it daily for business and pleasure. Unfortunately, however, we unwittingly reveal a huge amount of private information about ourselves when we search the web. A look at a user's search terms over a period of a few months paints a frighteningly clear and detailed picture about the user's life. In this paper, we build on previous work by Castella`a`-Roca et al. (Computer Communications 2009) and show how to achieve privacy in web searches efficiently and practically without resorting to full-blown anonymous routing. In contrast to previous work, our protocol is secure in the presence of malicious adversaries.