cronokirby

(2026-02) Fuzzy Private Set Intersection from Density-Bounded Assumptions

2026-02-14

Abstract

We propose a new fuzzy private set intersection (FPSI) protocol, a two-party functionality that securely identifies similar items across private sets. Our design departs from the prevailing separation-based paradigm in existing constructions. Rather than enforcing common separation-based assumptions, e.g., ``apart by 2δ2\delta'' or disjoint projection assumptions, we adopt a fundamentally different perspective: we explicitly allow collisions within δ\delta-balls, but require that their multiplicity be bounded per axis. We formalize this by introducing a new structural assumption called \textit{kk-max collision}, which upper-bounds the number of items intersecting any δ\delta-ball along each axis by a parameter kk. This new assumption intrinsically reflects the axis-wise distinctness of the data through density, rather than pairwise separability. Following prior analyses of disjoint projection assumptions, we show the plausibility of kk-max collision by proving that uniformly distributed data satisfies this property. Under the kk-max collision assumption, we propose an FPSI protocol with computation/communication complexities scaling linearly with both parties' set sizes and the data dimension for a fixed kk. Our results demonstrate that separation assumptions are not necessary for efficient FPSI. Notably, our construction accommodates the intermediate-dimension regime (1dκ1\ll d \ll \kappa for the data dimension dd and the statistical security parameter κ\kappa), which has remained neither efficiently supported nor well-justified under existing separation-based FPSI paradigms.