English

On the Leaky Private Information Retrieval with Side Information

Information Theory 2026-01-21 v2 math.IT

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of Leaky Private Information Retrieval with Side Information (L-PIR-SI), providing a fundamental characterization of the trade-off among leaky privacy, side information, and download cost. We propose a unified probabilistic framework to design L-PIR-SI schemes under ε\varepsilon-differential privacy variants of both WW-privacy and (W,S)(W, S)-privacy. Explicit upper bounds on the download cost are derived, which strictly generalize existing results: our bounds recover the capacity of perfect PIR-SI as ε0\varepsilon \to 0, and reduce to the known ε\varepsilon-leaky PIR rate in the absence of side information. Furthermore, we conduct a refined analysis of the privacy--utility trade-off at the scaling-law level, demonstrating that the leakage ratio exponent scales as O(logKM+1)\mathcal{O}(\log \frac{K}{M + 1}) under leaky WW-privacy, and as O(logK)\mathcal{O}(\log K) under leaky (W,S)(W, S)-privacy in the minimal non-trivial setting M=1M = 1, where KK and MM denote the number of messages and the side information size, respectively.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.09960,
  title  = {On the Leaky Private Information Retrieval with Side Information},
  author = {Yingying Huangfu and Tian Bai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.09960},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

24 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:05:06.613Z