SODA: A Set of Fast Oblivious Algorithms in Distributed Secure Data Analytics

Cloud systems are now a prevalent platform to host large-scale big-data analytics applications such as machine learning and relational database. However, data privacy remains as a critical concern for public cloud systems. Existing trusted hardware could provide an isolated execution domain on an untrusted platform, but also suffers from access-pattern-based side channels at various levels including memory, disks, and networking. Oblivious algorithms can address these vulnerabilities by hiding the program data access patterns. Unfortunately, current oblivious algorithms for data analytics are limited to single-machine execution, only support simple operations, and/or suffer from significant performance overheads due to the use of expensive global sort and excessive data padding. In this work, we propose SODA, a set of efficient and oblivious algorithms for distributed data analytics operators, including filter, aggregate, and binary equi-join. To improve performance, SODA completely avoids the expensive oblivious global sort primitive, and minimizes the data padding overheads. SODA makes use of low-cost (pseudo-)random communication instead of expensive global sort to ensure uniform data traffic in oblivious filter and aggregate. It also adopts a novel two-level bin-packing approach in oblivious join to alleviate both input redistribution and join product skewness, thus minimizing necessary data padding. Compared to the state-of-the-art system, SODA not only extends the functionality but also improves the performance. It achieves 1.1× to 14.6× speedups on complex multi-operator data analytics workloads.