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The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Information-Theoretic and Computational PIR for Communication Efficiency

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Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 8555))

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Abstract

The goal of Private Information Retrieval (PIR) is the ability to query a database successfully without the operator of the database server discovering which record(s) of the database the querier is interested in. There are two main classes of PIR protocols: those that provide privacy guarantees based on the computational limitations of servers (CPIR) and those that rely on multiple servers not colluding for privacy (IT-PIR). These two classes have different advantages and disadvantages that make them more or less attractive to designers of PIR-enabled privacy enhancing technologies.

We present a hybrid PIR protocol that combines two PIR protocols, one from each of these classes. Our protocol inherits many positive aspects of both classes and mitigates some of the negative aspects. For example, our hybrid protocol maintains partial privacy when the security assumptions of one of the component protocols is broken, mitigating the privacy loss in such an event. We have implemented our protocol as an extension of the Percy++ library so that it combines a PIR protocol by Aguilar Melchor and Gaborit with one by Goldberg. We show that our hybrid protocol uses less communication than either of these component protocols and that our scheme is particularly beneficial when the number of records in a database is large compared to the size of the records. This situation arises in applications such as TLS certificate verification, anonymous communications systems, private LDAP lookups, and others.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Casey Devet & Ian Goldberg

Authors
  1. Casey Devet
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  2. Ian Goldberg
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University College London, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT, London, UK

    Emiliano De Cristofaro

  2. Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, 15 JJ Thomson Avenue, CB3 0FD, Cambridge, UK

    Steven J. Murdoch

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Devet, C., Goldberg, I. (2014). The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Information-Theoretic and Computational PIR for Communication Efficiency. In: De Cristofaro, E., Murdoch, S.J. (eds) Privacy Enhancing Technologies. PETS 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8555. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08506-7_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08506-7_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-08505-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-08506-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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