Symmetric Private Information Retrieval For MDS Coded Distributed Storage
This work addresses privacy for both users and databases in distributed storage, providing a theoretical foundation for secure data retrieval in coded systems.
The paper tackles the problem of symmetric private information retrieval (SPIR) for a database stored using MDS codes in a distributed system, deriving the information-theoretic capacity as 1 - M/N when sufficient shared randomness is available, and zero otherwise.
A user wants to retrieve a file from a database without revealing the identity of the file retrieved at the database, which is known as the problem of private information retrieval (PIR). If it is further required that the user obtains no information about the database other than the desired file, the concept of symmetric private information retrieval (SPIR) is introduced to guarantee privacy for both parties. In this paper, the problem of SPIR is studied for a database stored among $N$ nodes in a distributed way, by using an $(N,M)$-MDS storage code. The information-theoretic capacity of SPIR, defined as the maximum number of symbols of the desired file retrieved per downloaded symbol, for the coded database is derived. It is shown that the SPIR capacity for coded database is $1-\frac{M}{N}$, when the amount of the shared common randomness of distributed nodes (unavailable at the user) is at least $\frac{M}{N-M}$ times the file size. Otherwise, the SPIR capacity for the coded database equals zero.