Practical access pattern privacy by combining PIR and oblivious shuffle

Abstract

We consider the following secure data retrieval problem: a client outsources encrypted data blocks to a semi-trusted cloud server and later retrieves blocks without disclosing access patterns. Existing PIR and ORAM solutions suffer from serious performance bottlenecks in terms of communication or computation costs. To help eliminate this void, we introduce “access pattern unlinkability” that separates access pattern privacy into short-term privacy at individual query level and long-term privacy at query distribution level. This new security definition provides tunable trade-offs between privacy and query performance. We present an efficient construction, called SBR protocol, using PIR and Oblivious Shuffling to enable secure data retrieval while satisfying access pattern unlinkability. Both analytical and empirical analysis show that SBR exhibits flexibility and usability in practice.