Private Information Retrieval using Product-Matrix Minimum Storage Regenerating Codes

TL;DR

This paper explores private information retrieval schemes utilizing Minimum Storage Regenerating codes, analyzing the trade-offs between privacy, storage, and repair costs, and presents an explicit scheme achieving optimal trade-offs.

Contribution

It introduces a PIR scheme based on MSR codes that attains the optimal trade-off curve between privacy, storage, and repair efficiency.

Findings

Achieves optimal trade-off between privacy, storage, and repair costs.

Provides an explicit PIR scheme using MSR codes.

Analyzes the cost relationships in PIR with regenerating codes.

Abstract

Private Information Retrieval (PIR) schemes allow a user to retrieve a record from the server without revealing any information on which record is being downloaded. In this paper, we consider PIR schemes where the database is stored using Minimum Storage Regenerating (MSR) codes which is a class of optimal regenerating codes providing efficient repair when a node failure occurs in the system. We analyse the relationship between the costs of privacy, storage and repair, and also construct an explicit PIR scheme that uses the MSR codes from [3] to achieve the optimal curve of the trade-off.