Practical oblivious storage

Abstract

We study oblivious storage (OS), a natural way to model privacy-preserving data outsourcing where a client, Alice, stores sensitive data at an honest-but-curious server, Bob. We show that Alice can hide both the content of her data and the pattern in which she accesses her data, with high probability, using a method that achieves O(1) amortized rounds of communication between her and Bob for each data access. We assume that Alice and Bob exchange small messages, of size O(N1/c), for some constant c>=2, in a single round, where N is the size of the data set that Alice is storing with Bob. We also assume that Alice has a private memory of size 2N1/c. These assumptions model real-world cloud storage scenarios, where trade-offs occur between latency, bandwidth, and the size of the client's private memory.