International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Several cryptographic constructions that aim to preserve privacy (such as Privacy Preserving Measurement –PPM–, or Private Information Retrieval –PIR–) schemes incur in computational, bandwidth, and consequent financial overheads on standard, cloud-based infrastructure that make them expensive to run at scale. Furthermore, they sometimes require specialized costly hardware. In practice, these overheads and constraints make them unusable for small organizations that cannot handle the large computational or financial costs. Here, we explore two alternative schemes (as an example) that can work for small organizations in the real-world, by looking both at the constrains they have to work on, and the impact of this type cryptography in the real-world. We conclude by asking whether the research community has done enough to take into the account the cases of organizations with financial, network or hardware constraints, and how we can design future cryptography for them.