Private Information Retrieval (PIR) protocols allow a client to retrieve any file of interest while keeping the files identity hidden from the database servers. While many existing PIR protocols assume servers to be honest but curious, we investigate the scenario of dishonest servers that provide incorrect answers to mislead clients into obtaining wrong results. We propose a unified framework for polynomial PIR protocols encompassing various existing protocols that optimize the download rate or total communication cost. We introduce a way to transform a polynomial PIR to a verifiable one without increasing the number of involved servers by doubling the queries. The security guarantees can be information-theoretic or computational, and the verification keys can be public or private. Moreover, in one of our protocols, the ratio between the additional download overhead associated with verification and the normal download cost approaches zero as the file size goes to infinity.
Private Information Retrieval (PIR) protocols allow a client to retrieve any file of interest while keeping the files identity hidden from the database servers. While many existing PIR protocols assume servers to be honest but curious, we investigate the scenario of dishonest servers that provide incorrect answers to mislead clients into obtaining wrong results. We propose a unified framework for polynomial PIR protocols encompassing various existing protocols that optimize the download rate or total communication cost. We introduce a way to transform a polynomial PIR to a verifiable one without increasing the number of involved servers by doubling the queries. The security guarantees can be information-theoretic or computational, and the verification keys can be public or private. Moreover, in one of our protocols, the ratio between the additional download overhead associated with verification and the normal download cost approaches zero as the file size goes to infinity.
Private information retrieval (PIR) allows a client to retrieve any block xifrom a database x = x1xnsuch that i remains hidden from the database servers. PIR •protocols with unconditional privacy and sublinear (in n) communication complexity can be constructed assuming multiple honest-but-curious servers. This assumption however cannot be guaranteed in many real life scenarios such as using cloud servers as database servers. In this paper, we consider an information-theoretic PIR with result verification (PIR-RV) model where the servers may be dishonest (i.e., cheating) and provide incorrect answers but the client can detect the existence of cheating servers. We construct a 2-server PIR-RV protocol with communication complexity O(n1/2log p) where p is a parameter and controls the probability that the client fails to detect. Our idea may be extended to construct k-server PIR-RV protocols for k ≥ 3.
In information-theoretic private information retrieval (PIR), a client wants to retrieve one desired file out ofMfiles, stored acrossNservers, while keeping the index of the desired file private from eachT-sized subset of servers. A PIR protocol must ideally maximize the rate, which is the ratio of the file size to the total quantum of the download from the servers, while ensuring such privacy. In Weak-PIR (WPIR), the criterion of perfect information-theoretic privacy is relaxed. This enables higher rates to be achieved, while some information about the desired file index leaks to the servers. This leakage is captured by various known privacy metrics. By leveraging the well-established capacity-achieving schemes of Sun and Jafar under non-colluding (T=1) and colluding (1<T≤N) scenarios, we present WPIR protocols for these scenarios. We also present a new WPIR scheme for the MDS scenario, by building upon the scheme by Banawan and Ulukus for this scenario. We present corresponding explicit rate-privacy trade-offs for these setups, under the mutual-information and the maximal leakage privacy metrics. In the collusion-free setup, our presented rateprivacy trade-off under maximal leakage matches that of the previous state of the art. With respect to the MDS scenario under the maximal leakage metric, we compare with the non-explicit trade-off in the literature, and show that our scheme performs better for some numerical examples. For theT-collusion setup (under both privacy metrics) and for the MDS setup under the mutual information metric, our rate-privacy trade-offs are the first in the literature, to the best of our knowledge.
Private Information Retrieval (PIR) allows clients to retrieve database entries without leaking retrieval indices, yet malicious servers seriously compromise retrieval correctness. Existing Authenticated PIR (APIR) schemes resist selective-failure attacks but rely on computational hardness assumptions. In contrast, information-theoretic PIR with Result Verification (itPIR-RV) achieves integrity without computational assumptions, yet only provides relaxed query privacy with no defense against selective-failure attacks. This paper focuses on unconditionally secure information-theoretic APIR (itAPIR) constructions. We propose the rigorous information-theoretic security definition for itAPIR with statistical privacy against selective-failure attacks and integrity as core properties, formalize the hierarchical relation between itAPIR and itPIR-RV as a relaxed variant with identical integrity but basic query privacy, and prove a conversion theorem that valid itPIR-RV schemes can be directly upgraded to secure itAPIR with no extra overhead. Our work bridges the theoretical gap, simplifies itAPIR design, and enables quantum-resistant PIR in malicious server environments.
A Private Information Retrieval (PIR) protocol allows a client to learn the ith row of a database held by one or more servers, without revealing i to the servers. A Random-Index PIR (RPIR) protocol, introduced by Gentry et al. (TCC 2021), is a PIR protocol where, instead of being chosen by the client, i is random. This has applications in e.g. anonymous committee selection. Both PIR and RPIR protocols are interesting only if the communication complexity is smaller than the database size; otherwise, the trivial solution where the servers send the entire database suffices. Unlike PIR, where the client must send at least one message (to encode information about i), RPIR can be executed in a single round of server-to-client communication. In this paper, we study such one-round, information-theoretic RPIR protocols. The only known construction in this setting is SimpleMSRPIR (Gentry et al.), which requires the servers to communicate approximately N/2 bits, N being the database size. We show an Ω(√N) lower bound on communication complexity for one-round two-server information-theoretic RPIR, and a sublinear upper bound. Finally, we show how to use a sublinear amount of database-independent correlated randomness among multiple servers to get near-optimal online communication complexity (the size of one row plus the size of one index description per server).
A Private Information Retrieval (PIR) protocol allows a client to learn the ith row of a database held by one or more servers, without revealing i to the servers. A Random-Index PIR (RPIR) protocol, introduced by Gentry et al. (TCC 2021), is a PIR protocol where, instead of being chosen by the client, i is random. This has applications in e.g. anonymous committee selection. Both PIR and RPIR protocols are interesting only if the communication complexity is smaller than the database size; otherwise, the trivial solution where the servers send the entire database suffices. Unlike PIR, where the client must send at least one message (to encode information about i), RPIR can be executed in a single round of server-to-client communication. In this paper, we study such one-round, information-theoretic RPIR protocols. The only known construction in this setting is SimpleMSRPIR (Gentry et al.), which requires the servers to communicate approximately N/2 bits, N being the database size. We show an Ω(√N) lower bound on communication complexity for one-round two-server information-theoretic RPIR, and a sublinear upper bound. Finally, we show how to use a sublinear amount of database-independent correlated randomness among multiple servers to get near-optimal online communication complexity (the size of one row plus the size of one index description per server).
The Private Information Retrieval protocol(PIR) is an important secure multi-party computation protocol.In PIR,a user can perform a query from a database without revealing his private information;meanwhile the privacy of the database will be protected,too.This paper proposes a new scheme in which we apply cryptographic technology on the auxiliary random servers protocol to solve the problem of PIR.This scheme is efficient in computational complexity and doesn't increase the cost of communication.It is very practical and can retrieve a block of bits.Detailed analysis of security,computational complexity and communicational complexity to the scheme is also given in this paper.