On the privacy of a code-based single-server computational PIR scheme

We show that the single-server computational PIR protocol proposed by Holzbaur, Hollanti and Wachter-Zeh in 2020 is not private, in the sense that the server can recover in polynomial time the index of the desired file with very high probability. The attack relies on the following observation. Removing rows of the query matrix corresponding to the desired file yields a large decrease of the dimension over \(\mathbb{F}_q\) of the vector space spanned by the rows of this punctured matrix. Such a dimension loss only shows up with negligible probability when rows unrelated to the requested file are deleted.