Wally: Batched Private Nearest Neighbor Search at Scale · HackerPapers discussions

Wally: Batched Private Nearest Neighbor Search at Scale — HN submission

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 14:43:06 GMT

Scalable Private Search with Wally

1 point; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Wally: Batched Private Nearest Neighbor Search at Scale — mentioned by abalone

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 20:44:38 GMT

This has gone a bit under the radar but Apple went and built a private search engine that doesn’t know what you’re searching for. It’s called Wally and it powers queries like caller ID and landmark recognition in photos. * Homomorphic encryption is nothing short of dark magic that makes it impossible for the server to know what you are searching for or what it’s responding with (at considerable greater computational expense). * To make it scale they added differential privacy techniques that generate fake queries from clients to hide which shards are being queried. So rather than always…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Wally: Batched Private Nearest Neighbor Search at Scale — mentioned by internetter

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 02:15:39 GMT

I don't completely understand the maths of how this works, but no, they don't. Here's a theoretical way I wrote in another comment: > I think they have more efficient ways, but theoretically what you could do is apply each row in your database to this encrypted value, in such a way that the encrypted value becomes the name of the POI of the best match, or otherwise junk is appended (completely changing the encrypted value) Again, the server has not read the encrypted value, it does not know which row won out. Only the client will know when it decrypts the new value. They do something like…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.