Volume 12, Number 12, July 2022

Mistakes of a Popular Protocol Calculating Private Set Intersection and Union Cardinality and its Corrections

  Authors

Yang Tan¹ and Bo Lv², ¹Shenzhen Qianhai Xinxin Digital Technology Co., China, ²Huizhou University, China

  Abstract

In 2012, De Cristofaro et al. proposed a protocol to calculate the Private Set Intersection and Union cardinality (PSI-CA and PSU-CA). This protocol's security is based on the famous DDH assumption. Since its publication, it has gained lots of popularity because of its efficiency (linear complexity in computation and communication) and concision. So far, it's still considered one of the most efficient PSI-CA protocols and the most cited (more than 170 citations) PSI-CA paper based on the Google Scholar search.

However, when we tried to implement this protocol, we couldn't get the correct result of the test data. Since the original paper lacks of experimental results to verify the protocol's correctness, we looked deeper into the protocol and found out it made a fundamental mistake. Needless to say, its correctness analysis and security proof are also wrong.

In this paper, we will point out this PSI-CA protocol's mistakes, and provide the correct version of this protocol as well as the PSI protocol developed from this protocol. We also present a new security proof and some experimental results of the corrected protocol.

  Keywords

Private Set Intersection, PSI-CA, PSU-CA.