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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Single-Server Private Information Retrieval with Sublinear Amortized Time

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

We construct new private-information-retrieval protocols in the singleserver setting. Our schemes allow a client to privately fetch a sequence of database records from a server, while the server answers each query in average time sublinear in the database size. Specifically, we introduce the first single-server private-information-retrieval schemes that have sublinear amortized server time, require sublinear additional storage, and allow the client to make her queries adaptively. Our protocols rely only on standard cryptographic assumptions (decision Diffie-Hellman, quadratic residuosity, learning with errors, etc.). They work by having the client first fetch a small “hint” about the database contents from the server. Generating this hint requires server time linear in the database size. Thereafter, the client can use the hint to make a bounded number of adaptive queries to the server, which the server answers in sublinear time—yielding sublinear amortized cost. Finally, we give lower bounds proving that our most efficient scheme is optimal with respect to the trade-off it achieves between server online time and client storage.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master
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
2022

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Henzinger, Alexandra
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Corrigan-Gibbs, Henry

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
  • Copyright MIT

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/144714
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/144714

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
related terms
citation

Henzinger, Alexandra. Single-Server Private Information Retrieval with Sublinear Amortized Time. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2022. https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/144714