OptORAMa: Optimal Oblivious RAM

Oblivious RAM (ORAM), first introduced in the ground-breaking work of Goldreich and Ostrovsky (STOC ’87 and J. ACM ’96) is a technique for provably obfuscating programs’ access patterns, such that the access patterns leak no information about the programs’ secret inputs. To compile a general program to an oblivious counterpart, it is well-known that Ω (log N ) amortized blowup in memory accesses is necessary, where N is the size of the logical memory. This was shown in Goldreich and Ostrovksy’s original ORAM work for statistical security and in a somewhat restricted model (the so-called balls-and-bins model), and recently by Larsen and Nielsen (CRYPTO ’18) for computational security. A long-standing open question is whether there exists an optimal ORAM construction that matches the aforementioned logarithmic lower bounds (without making large memory word assumptions, and assuming a constant number of CPU registers). In this article, we resolve this problem and present the first secure ORAM with O (log N ) amortized blowup, assuming one-way functions. Our result is inspired by and non-trivially improves on the recent beautiful work of Patel et al. (FOCS ’18) who gave a construction with O (log N ⋅ log log N ) amortized blowup, assuming one-way functions. One of our building blocks of independent interest is a linear-time deterministic oblivious algorithm for tight compaction: Given an array of n elements where some elements are marked, we permute the elements in the array so that all marked elements end up in the front of the array. Our O ( n ) algorithm improves the previously best-known deterministic or randomized algorithms whose running time is O ( n ⋅ log n ) or O ( n ⋅ log log n ), respectively.