International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Oblivious RAMs, introduced by Goldreich and Ostrovsky [JACM’96], compile any RAM program into one that is “memory oblivious,” i.e., the access pattern to the memory is independent of the input. All previous ORAM schemes, however, completely break the locality of data accesses (for instance, by shuffling the data to pseudorandom positions in memory). In this work, we initiate the study of locality-preserving ORAMs —ORAMs that preserve locality of the accessed memory regions, while leaking only the lengths of contiguous memory regions accessed. Our main results demonstrate the existence of a locality-preserving ORAM with polylogarithmic overhead both in terms of bandwidth and locality. We also study the trade-off between locality, bandwidth and leakage, and show that any scheme that preserves locality and does not leak the lengths of the contiguous memory regions accessed, suffers from prohibitive bandwidth. To further improve the parameters, we also consider a weaker notion of a File ORAM, which supports accesses to predefined non-overlapping regions. Assuming one-way functions, we present a computationally secure File ORAM that has a work overhead and locality of roughly $$O(\log ^2 N)$$ O ( log 2 N ) , while ignoring $$\log \log N$$ log log N factors. To the best of our knowledge, before our work, the only works combining locality and obliviousness were for symmetric searchable encryption [e.g., Cash and Tessaro (EUROCRYPT’14), Asharov et al. (STOC’16)]. Symmetric search encryption ensures obliviousness if each keyword is searched only once, whereas ORAM provides obliviousness to any input program. Thus, our work generalizes that line of work to the much more challenging task of preserving locality in ORAMs.

Although Byzantine Agreement (BA) has been studied for three decades, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, there still exist significant gaps in our understanding regarding its round complexity. A long-standing open question is the following: can we achieve BA with sublinear round complexity under corrupt majority? Due to the beautiful works by Garay et al. (FOCS’07) and Fitzi and Nielsen (DISC’09), we have partial and affirmative answers to this question albeit for the narrow regime $$f = n/2 + o(n)$$ where f is the number of corrupt nodes and n is the total number of nodes. So far, no positive result is known about the setting $$f > 0.51n$$ even for static corruption! In this paper, we make progress along this somewhat stagnant front. We show that there exists a corrupt-majority BA protocol that terminates in $$O(frac{1}{epsilon } log frac{1}{delta })$$ rounds in the worst case, satisfies consistency with probability at least $$1 - delta $$ , and tolerates $$(1-epsilon )$$ fraction of corrupt nodes. Our protocol secures against an adversary that can corrupt nodes adaptively during the protocol execution but cannot perform “after-the-fact” removal of honest messages that have already been sent prior to corruption. Our upper bound is optimal up to a logarithmic factor in light of the elegant $$varOmega (1/epsilon )$$ lower bound by Garay et al. (FOCS’07).

State Machine Replication (SMR) is an important abstraction for a set of nodes to agree on an ever-growing, linearly-ordered log of transactions. In decentralized cryptocurrency applications, we would like to design SMR protocols that (1) resist adaptive corruptions; and (2) achieve small bandwidth and small confirmation time. All past approaches towards constructing SMR fail to achieve either small confirmation time or small bandwidth under adaptive corruptions (without resorting to strong assumptions such as the erasure model or proof-of-work).We propose a novel paradigm for reaching consensus that departs significantly from classical approaches. Our protocol is inspired by a social phenomenon called herding, where people tend to make choices considered as the social norm. In our consensus protocol, leader election and voting are coalesced into a single (randomized) process: in every round, every node tries to cast a vote for what it views as the most popular item so far: such a voting attempt is not always successful, but rather, successful with a certain probability. Importantly, the probability that the node is elected to vote for v is independent from the probability it is elected to vote for $$v' \ne v$$v′≠v. We will show how to realize such a distributed, randomized election process using appropriate, adaptively secure cryptographic building blocks.We show that amazingly, not only can this new paradigm achieve consensus (e.g., on a batch of unconfirmed transactions in a cryptocurrency system), but it also allows us to derive the first SMR protocol which, even under adaptive corruptions, requires only polylogarithmically many rounds and polylogarithmically many honest messages to be multicast to confirm each batch of transactions; and importantly, we attain these guarantees under standard cryptographic assumptions.

Oblivious RAMs, introduced by Goldreich and Ostrovsky [JACM’96], compile any RAM program into one that is “memory oblivious”, i.e., the access pattern to the memory is independent of the input. All previous ORAM schemes, however, completely break the locality of data accesses (for instance, by shuffling the data to pseudorandom positions in memory).In this work, we initiate the study of locality-preserving ORAMs—ORAMs that preserve locality of the accessed memory regions, while leaking only the lengths of contiguous memory regions accessed. Our main results demonstrate the existence of a locality-preserving ORAM with poly-logarithmic overhead both in terms of bandwidth and locality. We also study the tradeoff between locality, bandwidth and leakage, and show that any scheme that preserves locality and does not leak the lengths of the contiguous memory regions accessed, suffers from prohibitive bandwidth.To the best of our knowledge, before our work, the only works combining locality and obliviousness were for symmetric searchable encryption [e.g., Cash and Tessaro (EUROCRYPT’14), Asharov et al. (STOC’16)]. Symmetric search encryption ensures obliviousness if each keyword is searched only once, whereas ORAM provides obliviousness to any input program. Thus, our work generalizes that line of work to the much more challenging task of preserving locality in ORAMs.

We show that PRAMs can be obliviously simulated with perfect security, incurring only $$O(\log N \log \log N)$$ blowup in parallel runtime, $$O(\log ^3 N)$$ blowup in total work, and O(1) blowup in space relative to the original PRAM. Our results advance the theoretical understanding of Oblivious (Parallel) RAM in several respects. First, prior to our work, no perfectly secure Oblivious Parallel RAM (OPRAM) construction was known; and we are the first in this respect. Second, even for the sequential special case of our algorithm (i.e., perfectly secure ORAM), we not only achieve logarithmic improvement in terms of space consumption relative to the state-of-the-art, but also significantly simplify perfectly secure ORAM constructions. Third, our perfectly secure OPRAM scheme matches the parallel runtime of earlier statistically secure schemes with negligible failure probability. Since we remove the dependence (in performance) on the security parameter, our perfectly secure OPRAM scheme in fact asymptotically outperforms known statistically secure ones if (sub-)exponentially small failure probability is desired. Our techniques for achieving small parallel runtime are novel and we employ special expander graphs to derandomize earlier statistically secure OPRAM techniques—this is the first time such techniques are used in the constructions of ORAMs/OPRAMs.

The problem of Oblivious RAM (ORAM) has traditionally been studied in the single-server setting, but more recently the multi-server setting has also been considered. Yet it is still unclear whether the multi-server setting has any inherent advantages, e.g., whether the multi-server setting can be used to achieve stronger security goals or provably better efficiency than is possible in the single-server case.In this work, we construct a perfectly secure 3-server ORAM scheme that outperforms the best known single-server scheme by a logarithmic factor. In the process we also show, for the first time, that there exist specific algorithms for which multiple servers can overcome known lower bounds in the single-server setting.