Weakly-Private Information Retrieval From MDS-Coded Distributed Storage

Abstract: We consider the problem of weakly-private information retrieval (WPIR) when data is encoded by a maximum distance separable code and stored across multiple servers. In WPIR, a user wishes to retrieve a piece of data from a set of servers without leaking too much information about which piece of data she is interested in. We study and provide the first WPIR protocols for this scenario and present results on their optimal trade-off between download rate and information leakage using the maximal leakage privacy metric.