  An information theoretic approach to security and privacy called Secure And
Private Information Retrieval (SAPIR) is introduced. SAPIR is applied to
distributed data storage systems. In this approach, random combinations of all
contents are stored across the network. Our coding approach is based on Random
Linear Fountain (RLF) codes. To retrieve a content, a group of servers
collaborate with each other to form a Reconstruction Group (RG). SAPIR achieves
asymptotic perfect secrecy if at least one of the servers within an RG is not
compromised. Further, a Private Information Retrieval (PIR) scheme based on
random queries is proposed. The PIR approach ensures the users privately
download their desired contents without the servers knowing about the requested
contents indices. The proposed scheme is adaptive and can provide privacy
against a significant number of colluding servers.
