Paper 2024/719

Client-Efficient Online-Offline Private Information Retrieval

Abstract

Private Information Retrieval (PIR) permits clients to query data entries from a public database hosted on untrusted servers while preserving client privacy. Traditional PIR models suffer from high computation and/or bandwidth overhead due to linear database processing for privacy. Recently, Online-Offline PIR (OO-PIR) has been proposed to improve PIR practicality by precomputing query-independent materials to accelerate online access. While state-of-the-art OO-PIR schemes (e.g., S&P’24, CRYPTO’23) successfully reduce online processing cost to sublinear levels, they still impose substantial bandwidth and storage burdens on the client, especially when operating on large databases. In this paper, we propose Pirex, a new two-server OO-PIR with semi-honest security that offers minimal client inbound bandwidth and storage cost while retaining the sublinear processing efficiency. The Pirex design is simple with most operations are naturally low-cost and streamlined (e.g., XOR, PRF, modular arithmetic). We have fully implemented Pirex and evaluated its real-world performance using commodity hardware. Our results showed that Pirex outperforms existing OO-PIR schemes by at least two orders of magnitude. With a 1 TB database, Pirex takes 55ms to retrieve a 4 KB entry, compared with 9-30s by state-of-the-art. For practical databases with billions of 4 KB entries, Pirex only takes 16 KB of inbound bandwidth, which is up to three orders of magnitude more efficient.