On basing private information retrieval on NP-hardness
Author(s)
Liu, Tianren, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Advisor
Vinod Vaikuntanathan.
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The possibility of basing the security of cryptographic objects on the (minimal) assumption that NP ... BPP is at the very heart of complexity-theoretic cryptography. Most known results along these lines are negative, showing that assuming widely believed complexity-theoretic conjectures, there are no reductions from an NP-hard problem to the task of breaking certain cryptographic schemes. We make progress along this line of inquiry by showing that the security of single-server single-round private information retrieval schemes cannot be based on NP-hardness, unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses. Our main technical contribution is in showing how to break the security of a PIR protocol given an SZK oracle. Our result is tight in terms of both the correctness and the privacy parameter of the PIR scheme.
Description
Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2016. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Includes bibliographical references (pages 17-19).
Date issued
2016Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer SciencePublisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Keywords
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.