SealPIR

SealPIR: A computational PIR library that achieves low communication costs and high performance.

SealPIR is a research library and should not be used in production systems. SealPIR allows a client to download an element from a database stored by a server without revealing which element was downloaded. SealPIR was introduced at the Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland) in 2018. You can find a copy of the paper here.

This is a newer version of SealPIR that uses the latest version of SEAL and provides better serialization/deserialization of queries and responses, and a more streamlined code base. A drawback of this version is that ciphertexts are slightly larger (due to specifics with SEAL). If you wish to use the original version of SealPIR which uses an older version of SEAL and has smaller ciphertexts, check out the original branch in this repository.

Compiling SEAL

SealPIR depends on Microsoft SEAL version 3.6.5. Install SEAL before compiling SealPIR.

Compiling SealPIR

Once Microsoft SEAL 3.6.5 is installed, to build SealPIR simply run:

cmake .
make

This should produce a binary file bin/main.

Using SealPIR

Take a look at the example in src/main.cpp for how to use SealPIR. You can also look at the tests in the test folder. Note: the parameter "d" stands for recursion levels, and for the current configuration, the server-to-client reply has size (pow(10, d-1) * 32) KB. Therefore we recommend using d <= 3.

Contributing

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.microsoft.com.

When you submit a pull request, a CLA-bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., label, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repos using our CLA.

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.