{"ID":2835190,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00480","arxiv_id":"2512.00480","title":"A Unified Framework for Constructing Information-Theoretic Private Information Retrieval","abstract":"Retrieving up-to-date information from a publicly accessible database poses significant threats to the user's privacy. {\\em Private information retrieval} (PIR) protocols allow a user to retrieve any entry from a database, without revealing the identity of the entry being retrieved to the server(s). Such protocols have found numerous applications in both theoretical studies and real-life scenarios. The existing PIR constructions mainly give multi-server {\\em information-theoretic} PIR (IT-PIR) protocols or single-server computational PIR (CPIR) protocols. Compared with CPIR, IT-PIR protocols are computationally more efficient and secure in the presence of unbounded servers. The most classical and challenging problem in the realm of IT-PIR is constructing protocols with lower {\\em communication complexity}. In this review, we introduce a new discrete structure called {\\em families of orthogonal arrays with span capability} (FOASC) and propose a unified framework for constructing IT-PIR protocols. We show how the most influential IT-PIR protocols in the literature can be captured by the framework. We also put forward several interesting open problems concerning FOASC, whose solutions may result in innovative IT-PIR protocols.","short_abstract":"Retrieving up-to-date information from a publicly accessible database poses significant threats to the user's privacy. {\\em Private information retrieval} (PIR) protocols allow a user to retrieve any entry from a database, without revealing the identity of the entry being retrieved to the server(s). Such protocols have...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00480","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00480v1","authors":"[\"Liang Feng Zhang\"]","published":"2025-11-29T13:24:09Z","proceeding":"cs.CR","tasks":"[\"cs.CR\",\"cs.IT\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}