Optimal Rate-Distortion-Leakage Tradeoff for Single-Server Information Retrieval

Private information retrieval protocols guarantee that a user can
privately
and
losslessly
retrieve a single file from a database stored across multiple servers. In this work, we propose to simultaneously relax the conditions of perfect retrievability and privacy in order to obtain improved download rates when all files are stored uncoded on a single server. Information leakage is measured in terms of the average success probability for the server of correctly guessing the identity of the desired file. The main findings are: i) The derivation of the optimal tradeoff between download rate, distortion, and information leakage when the file size is
infinite
. Closed-form expressions of the optimal tradeoff for the special cases of “no-leakage” and “no-privacy” are also given. ii) A novel approach based on linear programming (LP) to construct schemes for a finite file size and an arbitrary number of files. The proposed LP approach can be leveraged to find provably optimal schemes with corresponding closed-form expressions for the rate-distortion-leakage tradeoff when the database contains at most four bits. Finally, for a database that contains 320 bits, we compare two construction methods based on the LP approach with a nonconstructive scheme downloading subsets of files using a finite-length lossy compressor based on random coding.