Efficient transformation capabilities of single database private block retrieval

Abstract

AbstractPrivate information retrieval (PIR) is one of the promising techniques to preserve user privacy in the presence of trusted-but-curious servers. The information theoretically private query construction assures the highest user privacy over curious and unbounded computation servers. Therefore, the need for information-theoretic private retrieval was fulfilled by various schemes in a variety of PIR settings. But, there is a lack of efficient encryption switching scheme which supports efficient switching between information-theoretic to/from computationally bounded PIRs. We propose a combination of new bit connection methods called rail-shape and signal-shape and new quadratic residuosity assumption based family of trapdoor functions for generic single database private block retrieval (PBR). The main goal of this work is to show that the possibility of mapping from computationally bounded privacy to information theoretic privacy or vice-versa in a single database setting using newly constructed bit connection and trapdoor function combinations. Notably, the proposed schemes are single round, memoryless and plain database schemes (at their basic constructions).