Paper 2023/204

TreePIR: Sublinear-Time and Polylog-Bandwidth Private Information Retrieval from DDH

Arthur Lazzaretti, Yale University
Charalampos Papamanthou, Yale University
Abstract

In Private Information Retrieval (PIR), a client wishes to retrieve the value of an index $i$ from a public database of $N$ values without leaking information about the index $i$. In their recent seminal work, Corrigan-Gibbs and Kogan (EUROCRYPT 2020) introduced the first two-server PIR protocol with sublinear amortized server time and sublinear, $O(\sqrt{N}\log N)$ bandwidth. In a followup work, Shi et al. (CRYPTO 2021) reduced the bandwidth to polylogarithmic by proposing a construction based on privately puncturable pseudorandom functions, a primitive whose only construction known to date is based on heave cryptographic primitives. Partly because of this, their PIR protocol does not achieve concrete efficiency. In this paper we propose TreePIR, a two-server PIR protocol with sublinear amortized server time and polylogarithmic bandwidth whose security can be based on just the DDH assumption. TreePIR can be partitioned in two phases, both sublinear: The first phase is remarkably simple and only requires pseudorandom generators. The second phase is a single-server PIR protocol on \emph{only} $\sqrt{N}$ indices, for which we can use the protocol by D\"ottling et al. (CRYPTO 2019) based on DDH, or, for practical purposes, the most concretely efficient single-server PIR protocol. Not only does TreePIR achieve better asymptotics than previous approaches while resting on weaker cryptographic assumptions, but it also outperforms existing two-server PIR protocols in practice. The crux of our protocol is a new cryptographic primitive that we call weak privately puncturable pseudorandom functions, which we believe can have further applications.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
Private Information Retrieval
Contact author(s)
arthur lazzaretti @ yale edu
charalampos papamanthou @ yale edu
History
2023-02-20: approved
2023-02-15: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2023/204
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/204,
      author = {Arthur Lazzaretti and Charalampos Papamanthou},
      title = {TreePIR: Sublinear-Time and Polylog-Bandwidth Private Information Retrieval from DDH},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2023/204},
      year = {2023},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/204}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/204}
}
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