Achieving Capacity of PIR with Private Side Information with Low Sub-packetization and without MDS Codes

This paper revisits the problem of multi-server Private Information Retrieval with Private Side Information (PIR-PSI). In this problem, N non-colluding servers store identical copies of K messages, each comprising L symbols from 𝔽_q, and a user, who knows M of these messages, wants to retrieve one of the remaining K-M messages. The user's goal is to retrieve the desired message by downloading the minimum amount of information from the servers while revealing no information about the identities of the desired message and side information messages to any server. The capacity of PIR-PSI, defined as the maximum achievable download rate, was previously characterized for all N, K, and M when L and q are sufficiently large – specifically, growing exponentially with K, to ensure the divisibility of each message into N^K sub-packets and to guarantee the existence of an MDS code with its length and dimension being exponential in K. In this work, we propose a new capacity-achieving PIR-PSI scheme that is applicable to all N, K, M, L, and q where N≥ M+1 and N-1| L. The proposed scheme operates with a sub-packetization level of N-1, independent of K, and works over any finite field without requiring an MDS code.