On quantum advantage in information theoretic single-server PIR

In (single-server) Private Information Retrieval (PIR), a server holds a large database DB of size n, and a client holds an index i∈[n] and wishes to retrieve DB[i] without revealing i to the server. It is well known that information theoretic privacy even against an “honest but curious” server requires Ω(n) communication complexity. This is true even if quantum communication is allowed and is due to the ability of such an adversarial server to execute the protocol on a superposition of databases instead of on a specific database (“input purification attack”). Nevertheless, there have been some proposals of protocols that achieve sub-linear communication and appear to provide some notion of privacy. Most notably, a protocol due to Le Gall (ToC 2012) with communication complexity O√n, and a protocol by Kerenidis et al. (QIC 2016) with communication complexity O(log(n)), and O(n) shared entanglement. We show that, in a sense, input purification is the only potent adversarial strategy, and protocols such as the two protocols above are secure in a restricted variant of the quantum honest but curious (a.k.a specious) model. More explicitly, we propose a restricted privacy notion called anchored privacy, where the adversary is forced to execute on a classical database (i.e. the execution is anchored to a classical database). We show that for measurement-free protocols, anchored security against honest adversarial servers implies anchored privacy even against specious adversaries. Finally, we prove that even with (unlimited) pre-shared entanglement it is impossible to achieve security in the standard specious model with sub-linear communication, thus further substantiating the necessity of our relaxation. This lower bound may be of independent interest (in particular recalling that PIR is a special case of Fully Homomorphic Encryption).