Paper 2025/224

Lightweight Single-Server PIR with $O_\lambda(n^{1/3})$ Communication

Abstract

It is well-known that any single-server PIR scheme with sublinear communication necessitates public-key cryptography. Several recent studies, which we collectively refer to as lightweight PIR, demonstrate that this limitation can be circumvented to some extent. However, all such schemes require at least $O(n^{1/2})$ communication per-query, where $n$ is the size of the database. Indeed, the celebrated result provided by Ishai et al. (Crypto '24) implies that, with solely symmetric-key cryptography, achieving per-query communication below $O(n^{1/2})$ necessitates more than $O(n^{1/2})$ client storage. Whether this barrier can be overcome with limited use of public-key cryptography remains an open question. In this paper, we tackle this question by presenting the first lightweight single-server PIR scheme with $O_\lambda(n^{1/3})$ communication while allowing arbitrary (non-zero) client storage.