What Storage Access Privacy is Achievable with Small Overhead?

Oblivious RAM (ORAM) and private information retrieval (PIR) are classic cryptographic primitives used to hide the access pattern to data whose storage has been outsourced to an untrusted server. Unfortunately, both primitives require considerable overhead compared to plaintext access. For large-scale storage infrastructure with highly frequent access requests, the degradation in response time and the exorbitant increase in resource costs incurred by either ORAM or PIR prevent their usage. In an ideal scenario, a privacy-preserving storage protocols with small overhead would be implemented for these heavily trafficked storage systems to avoid negatively impacting either performance and/or costs. In this work, we study the problem of the best $\mathit{storage\ access\ privacy}$that is achievable with only$\mathit{small\ overhead}$over plaintext access. To answer this question, we consider$\mathit{differential\ privacy\ access}$which is a generalization of the$\mathit{oblivious\ access}$security notion that are considered by ORAM and PIR. Quite surprisingly, we present strong evidence that constant overhead storage schemes may only be achieved with privacy budgets of$\epsilon = \Omega(\log n)$. We present asymptotically optimal constructions for differentially private variants of both ORAM and PIR with privacy budgets$\epsilon = \Theta(\log n)$with only$O(1)$overhead. In addition, we consider a more complex storage primitive called key-value storage in which data is indexed by keys from a large universe (as opposed to consecutive integers in ORAM and PIR). We present a differentially private key-value storage scheme with$\epsilon = \Theta(\log n)$and$O(\log\log n)$ overhead. This construction uses a new oblivious, two-choice hashing scheme that may be of independent interest.Comment: To appear at PODS'1

Lower Bounds for Oblivious Near-Neighbor Search

We prove an $\Omega(d \lg n/ (\lg\lg n)^2)$ lower bound on the dynamic cell-probe complexity of statistically $\mathit{oblivious}$ approximate-near-neighbor search ($\mathsf{ANN}$) over the $d$-dimensional Hamming cube. For the natural setting of $d = \Theta(\log n)$, our result implies an $\tilde{\Omega}(\lg^2 n)$ lower bound, which is a quadratic improvement over the highest (non-oblivious) cell-probe lower bound for $\mathsf{ANN}$. This is the first super-logarithmic $\mathit{unconditional}$ lower bound for $\mathsf{ANN}$ against general (non black-box) data structures. We also show that any oblivious $\mathit{static}$ data structure for decomposable search problems (like $\mathsf{ANN}$) can be obliviously dynamized with $O(\log n)$ overhead in update and query time, strengthening a classic result of Bentley and Saxe (Algorithmica, 1980).Comment: 28 page

Deterministic, Stash-Free Write-Only ORAM

Write-Only Oblivious RAM (WoORAM) protocols provide privacy by encrypting the contents of data and also hiding the pattern of write operations over that data. WoORAMs provide better privacy than plain encryption and better performance than more general ORAM schemes (which hide both writing and reading access patterns), and the write-oblivious setting has been applied to important applications of cloud storage synchronization and encrypted hidden volumes. In this paper, we introduce an entirely new technique for Write-Only ORAM, called DetWoORAM. Unlike previous solutions, DetWoORAM uses a deterministic, sequential writing pattern without the need for any "stashing" of blocks in local state when writes fail. Our protocol, while conceptually simple, provides substantial improvement over prior solutions, both asymptotically and experimentally. In particular, under typical settings the DetWoORAM writes only 2 blocks (sequentially) to backend memory for each block written to the device, which is optimal. We have implemented our solution using the BUSE (block device in user-space) module and tested DetWoORAM against both an encryption only baseline of dm-crypt and prior, randomized WoORAM solutions, measuring only a 3x-14x slowdown compared to an encryption-only baseline and around 6x-19x speedup compared to prior work

ObliviSync: Practical Oblivious File Backup and Synchronization

Oblivious RAM (ORAM) protocols are powerful techniques that hide a client's data as well as access patterns from untrusted service providers. We present an oblivious cloud storage system, ObliviSync, that specifically targets one of the most widely-used personal cloud storage paradigms: synchronization and backup services, popular examples of which are Dropbox, iCloud Drive, and Google Drive. This setting provides a unique opportunity because the above privacy properties can be achieved with a simpler form of ORAM called write-only ORAM, which allows for dramatically increased efficiency compared to related work. Our solution is asymptotically optimal and practically efficient, with a small constant overhead of approximately 4x compared with non-private file storage, depending only on the total data size and parameters chosen according to the usage rate, and not on the number or size of individual files. Our construction also offers protection against timing-channel attacks, which has not been previously considered in ORAM protocols. We built and evaluated a full implementation of ObliviSync that supports multiple simultaneous read-only clients and a single concurrent read/write client whose edits automatically and seamlessly propagate to the readers. We show that our system functions under high work loads, with realistic file size distributions, and with small additional latency (as compared to a baseline encrypted file system) when paired with Dropbox as the synchronization service.Comment: 15 pages. Accepted to NDSS 201