Paper 2025/1055

Single-server Stateful PIR with Verifiability and Balanced Efficiency

Abstract

Recent stateful private information retrieval (PIR) schemes have significantly improved amortized computation and amortized communication while aiming to keep client storage minimal. However, all the schemes in the literature still suffer from a poor tradeoff between client storage and computation. We present BALANCED-PIR, a stateful PIR scheme that effectively balances computation and client storage. For a database of a million entries, each of 8 bytes, our scheme requires 0.2 MB of client storage, 0.2 ms of amortized computation, and 11.14 KB of amortized communication. Compared with the state-of-the-art scheme using a similar storage setting, our scheme is almost 9x better in amortized computation and 40x better in offline computation. Verifiable private information retrieval has been gaining more attention recently. However, all existing schemes require linear amortized computation and huge client storage. We present Verifiable BALANCED-PIR, a verifiable stateful PIR scheme with sublinear amortized computation and small client storage. In fact, our Verifiable BALANCED-PIR adds modest computation, communication, and storage costs on top of BALANCED-PIR. Compared with the state-of-the-art verifiable scheme, the client storage of our scheme is 100x smaller, the amortized computation is 15x less, and the amortized communication is 2.5x better.

Note: The offline computation metric is defined to be the initial offline computation cost instead of the average offline computation cost in this updated draft. The initial offline computation cost is the more relevant metric as it measures the initial wait time before the client can make queries.