PIRANA: Faster Multi-query PIR via Constant-weight Codes
Jian Liu, Jingyu Li, Di Wu, Kui Ren
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2024 · Day 3 · Continental Ballroom 6
This talk introduces PIRANA, a novel protocol designed to significantly accelerate **Private Information Retrieval (PIR)**, particularly for multi-query scenarios. Presented by Jian Liu and co-authored with Jingyu Li, Di Wu, and Kui Ren, the work addresses the critical need for more efficient privacy-preserving data retrieval mechanisms. PIR is a foundational cryptographic primitive allowing a client to retrieve an item from a server's database by its index, without revealing which item was requested. This capability underpins a wide array of privacy-sensitive applications, including private contact discovery, secure browsing, and private navigation.
AI review
This work presents PIRANA, a groundbreaking PIR protocol leveraging constant-weight codes and novel FHE optimizations to achieve unprecedented speedups (up to 188.5x faster than prior art). It effectively tackles the practical deployment challenge of privacy-preserving data retrieval, making high-throughput multi-query PIR and L-PSI viable for real-world applications. This is a critical advancement for privacy engineering.