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Paper 2024/1909

NewtonPIR: Communication Efficient Single-Server PIR

Abstract

Private information retrieval (PIR) is a key component of many privacy-preserving systems. Although numerous PIR protocols have been proposed, designing a PIR scheme with communication overhead independent of the database size $N$ and computational cost practical for real-world applications remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose the NewtonPIR protocol, a communication efficient single-server PIR scheme. NewtonPIR can directly generate query values for the entire index without splitting the index and sending multiple query ciphertexts. Specifically, NewtonPIR achieves communication overhead that is 7.5$\times$ better than the state-of-the-art PIR protocol and 35.9$\sim$75$\times$ better than the other protocols. In experiments, when the database size and entry size increase, the communication overhead of NewtonPIR remains stable. By utilizing the single-ciphertext fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) scheme and the simple Newton interpolation polynomial, along with precomputing coefficients in the offline phase, we reduce the computational overhead of NewtonPIR from hours in previous schemes to seconds. To the best of our knowledge, NewtonPIR is the first protocol to achieve communication cost independent of $N$ along with computational overhead comparable to ring learning with errors (RLWE)-based PIR schemes. Additionally, we extend and introduce a private set intersection (PSI) protocol that balances computational and communication overhead more effectively.