Paper 2026/437 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2026/437 ↗

Efficient Single-Server Stateful PIR Using Format-Preserving Encryption

Abstract

Recently, Stateful Private Information Retrieval (PIR) has emerged as a promising new paradigm of PIR. Despite significant recent progress, state-of-the-art single-server schemes in this paradigm still suffer from practical inefficiencies in communication, computation, and/or client storage. In this work, we construct a new single-server stateful PIR scheme called HarmonyPIR that achieves efficient communication, computation, and client storage. From a technical standpoint, we build on the recent work of Wang and Ren (EUROCRYPT 25) and propose a new hint organization that uses only a single random permutation. The random permutation can be instantiated using either AES or the recently standardized FF1 Format-Preserving Encryption, yielding two variants of HarmonyPIR. Our new scheme achieves up to two orders of magnitude better amortized computation and up to five times better amortized communication than state-of-the-art schemes.