On basing private information retrieval on NP-hardness

The possibility of basing the security of cryptographic objects on the (minimal) assumption that NP ... BPP is at the very heart of complexity-theoretic cryptography. Most known results along these lines are negative, showing that assuming widely believed complexity-theoretic conjectures, there are no reductions from an NP-hard problem to the task of breaking certain cryptographic schemes. We make progress along this line of inquiry by showing that the security of single-server single-round private information retrieval schemes cannot be based on NP-hardness, unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses. Our main technical contribution is in showing how to break the security of a PIR protocol given an SZK oracle. Our result is tight in terms of both the correctness and the privacy parameter of the PIR scheme.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2016

Author dc:creator

• Liu, Tianren, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Vinod Vaikuntanathan.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/106093

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/106093