Paper 2020/376

On the privacy of a code-based single-server computational PIR scheme

Sarah Bordage and Julien Lavauzelle

Abstract

We show that the single-server computational PIR protocol proposed by Holzbaur, Hollanti and Wachter-Zeh in 2020 is not private, in the sense that the server can recover in polynomial time the index of the desired file with very high probability. The attack relies on the following observation. Removing rows of the query matrix corresponding to the desired file yields a large decrease of the dimension over $\mathbb{F}_q$ of the vector space spanned by the rows of this punctured matrix. Such a dimension loss only shows up with negligible probability when rows unrelated to the requested file are deleted.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
private information retrievalcryptanalysis
Contact author(s)
sarah bordage @ lix polytechnique fr
julien lavauzelle @ univ-rennes1 fr
History
2020-04-02: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2020/376
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2020/376,
      author = {Sarah Bordage and Julien Lavauzelle},
      title = {On the privacy of a code-based single-server computational {PIR} scheme},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2020/376},
      year = {2020},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/376}
}
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