On private information retrieval supporting range queries

Abstract

Private information retrieval (PIR) allows a client to retrieve data from a database without the database server learning what data is being retrieved. Although many PIR schemes have been proposed in the literature, almost all of these focus on retrieval of a single database element, and do not consider more flexible retrieval queries such as basic range queries. Furthermore, while practically-oriented database schemes aiming at providing flexible and privacy-preserving queries have been proposed, to the best of our knowledge, no formal treatment of range queries has been considered for these. In this paper, we firstly highlight that a simple extension of the standard PIR security notion to range queries, is insufficient in many usage scenarios, and propose a stronger security notion aimed at addressing this. We then show a simple generic construction of a PIR scheme meeting our stronger security notion, and propose a more efficient direct construction based on function secret sharing – while the former has a round complexity logarithmic in the size of the database, the round complexity of the latter is constant. Finally, we report on the practical performance of our direct construction.