Single Round-trip Hierarchical ORAM via Succinct Indices
William Holland, Olga Ohrimenko, Anthony I. Wirth · 2024
Access patterns to data stored remotely create a side channel that is known to leak information even if the content of the data is encrypted. To protect against access pattern leakage, Oblivious RAM is a cryptographic primitive that obscures the (actual) access trace at the expense of additional access and periodic shuffling of the server's contents. A class of ORAM solutions, known as Hierarchical ORAM, has achieved theoretically optimal logarithmic bandwidth overhead. However, to date, Hierarchical ORAMs are seen as only theoretical artifacts. This is because they require a large number of communication round-trips to locate (shuffled) elements at the server and involve complex building blocks such as cuckoo hash tables.