The Capacity of Single-Server Weakly-Private Information Retrieval

• A private information retrieval (PIR) protocol guar- antees that a user can privately retrieve files stored in a database without revealing any information about the identity of the requested file. Existing information-theoretic PIR proto- cols ensure perfect privacy, i.e., zero information leakage to the servers storing the database, but at the cost of high download. In this work, we present weakly-private information retrieval (WPIR) schemes that trade off perfect privacy to improve the download cost when the database is stored on a single server. We study the tradeoff between the download cost and information leakage in terms of mutual information (MI) and maximal leak- age (MaxL) privacy metrics. By relating the WPIR problem to rate-distortion theory, the download-leakage function, which is defined as the minimum required download cost of all single- server WPIR schemes for a given level of information leakage and a fixed file size, is introduced. By characterizing the download- leakage function for the MI and MaxL metrics, the capacity of single-server WPIR is fully described.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Annan data- och informationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Other Computer and Information Science (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap -- Biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications -- Information Studies (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Kommunikationssystem (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Communication Systems (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

information leakage

information-theoretic privacy

capacity

single server

Private information retrieval

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