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Title: New Results on the Storage-Retrieval Tradeoff in Private Information Retrieval Systems
Award ID(s):
2007067 1816546 1816518
PAR ID:
10295049
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory
Volume:
2
Issue:
1
ISSN:
2641-8770
Page Range / eLocation ID:
403 to 414
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. null (Ed.)
  2. Private information retrieval (PIR) enables clients to query and retrieve data from untrusted servers without the untrusted servers learning which data was retrieved. In this paper, we present a new class of multi-server PIR protocols, which we call heterogeneous PIR (HPIR). In such multi-server PIR protocols, the computation and communication overheads imposed on the PIR servers are non-uniform, i.e., some servers handle higher computation/communication burdens than the others. This enables heterogeneous PIR protocols to be suitable for a range of new PIR applications. What enables us to enforce such heterogeneity is a unique PIR-tailored secret sharing algorithm that we leverage in building our PIR protocol. We have implemented our HPIR protocol and evaluated its performance in comparison with regular (i.e., homogenous) PIR protocols. Our evaluations demonstrate that a querying client can trade off the computation and communication loads of the (heterogeneous) PIR servers by adjusting some parameters. For example in a two-server scenario with a heterogeneity degree of 4/1, to retrieve a 456KB file from a 0.2GB database, the rich (i.e., resourceful) PIR server will do 1.1 seconds worth of computation compared to 0.3 seconds by the poor (resource-constrained) PIR server; this is while each of the servers would do the same 1 seconds of computation in a homogeneous setting. Also, for this given example, our HPIR protocol will impose a 912KB communication bandwidth on the rich server compared to 228KB on the poor server (by contrast to 456KB overheads on each of the servers for a traditional homogeneous design). 
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