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Most cloud service providers offer limited data privacy guarantees, discouraging clients from using them for managing their sensitive data. Cloud providers may use servers with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to protect outsourced data, while supporting remote querying. However, TEEs may leak access patterns and allow communication volume attacks, enabling an honest-but-curious cloud provider to learn sensitive information. Oblivious algorithms can be used to completely hide data access patterns, but their high overhead could render them impractical. To alleviate the latter, the notion of Differential Obliviousness (DO) has been recently proposed. DO applies differential privacy (DP) on access patterns while hiding the communication volume of intermediate and final results; it does so by trading some level of privacy for efficiency. We present Doquet:DifferentiallyOblivious Range and JoinQueries with Private Data Structures, a framework for DO outsourced database systems. Doquet is the first approach that supports private data structures, indices, selection, foreign key join, many-to-many join, and their composition select-join in arealisticTEE setting, even when the accesses to the private memory can be eavesdropped on by the adversary. We prove that the algorithms in Doquet satisfy differential obliviousness. Furthermore, we implemented Doquet and tested it on a machine having a second generation of Intel SGX (TEE); the results show that Doquet offers up to an order of magnitude speedup in comparison with other fully oblivious and differentially oblivious approaches.
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A Theory of Composition for Differential Obliviousness
Differential obliviousness (DO) is a privacy notion which guarantees that the access patterns of a program satisfies differential privacy. Differential obliviousness was studied in a sequence of recent works as a relaxation of full obliviousness. Earlier works showed that DO not only allows us to circumvent the logarithmic-overhead barrier of fully oblivious algorithms, in many cases, it also allows us to achieve polynomial speedup over full obliviousness, since it avoids “padding to the worst-case” behavior of fully oblivious algorithms. Despite the promises of differential obliviousness (DO), a significant barrier that hinders its broad application is the lack of composability. In particular, when we apply one DO algorithm to the output of another DO algorithm, the composed algorithm may no longer be DO (with reasonable parameters). Specifically, the outputs of the first DO algorithm on two neighboring inputs may no longer be neighboring, and thus we cannot directly benefit from the DO guarantee of the second algorithm. In this work, we are the first to explore a theory of composition for differentially oblivious algorithms. We propose a refinement of the DO notion called (ε, δ)-neighbor-preserving-DO, or (ε,δ)-NPDO for short, and we prove that our new notion indeed provides nice compositional guarantees. In this way, the algorithm designer can easily track the privacy loss when composing multiple DO algorithms. We give several example applications to showcase the power and expressiveness of our new NPDO notion. One of these examples is a result of independent interest: we use the com- positional framework to prove an optimal privacy amplification theorem for the differentially oblivious shuffle model. In other words, we show that for a class of distributed differentially private mechanisms in the shuffle-model, one can replace the perfectly secure shuffler with a DO shuffler, and nonetheless enjoy almost the same privacy amplification enabled by a shuffler.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1704788
- PAR ID:
- 10464147
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Eurocrypt 2023
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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