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Weighted Oblivious RAM, with Applications to Searchable Symmetric Encryption

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Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2023 (EUROCRYPT 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14004))

Abstract

Existing Oblivious RAM protocols do not support the storage of data items of variable size in a non-trivial way. While the study of ORAM for items of variable size is of interest in and of itself, it is also motivated by the need for more performant and more secure Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) schemes.

In this article, we introduce the notion of weighted ORAM, which supports the storage of blocks of different sizes. We introduce a framework to build efficient weighted ORAM schemes, based on an underlying standard ORAM satisfying a certain suitability criterion. This criterion is fulfilled by various Tree ORAM schemes, including Simple ORAM and Path ORAM. We deduce several instantiations of weighted ORAM, with very little overhead compared to standard ORAM. As a direct application, we obtain efficient SSE constructions with attractive security properties.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The reader may observe that items of size 0 are not technically legal per the earlier definition of wORAM, which asks that items are of size at least 1; however, \({{\,\mathrm{\texttt {TransVar}}\,}}(\textsf{ORAM})\) remains well-defined even for items of size 0, so nothing stops us from using them within the proof—the reason we forbade items of size 0 is that they would allow for an unbounded number of items, which would require a position map of unbounded size, but this is irrelevant for the current line of reasoning.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the ANR project SaFED.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. École Normale Supérieure, PSL University, CNRS, Inria, Paris, France

    Léonard Assouline & Brice Minaud

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  1. Léonard Assouline
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  2. Brice Minaud
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Correspondence to Léonard Assouline .

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  1. Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

    Carmit Hazay

  2. Simula UiB, Bergen, Norway

    Martijn Stam

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Assouline, L., Minaud, B. (2023). Weighted Oblivious RAM, with Applications to Searchable Symmetric Encryption. In: Hazay, C., Stam, M. (eds) Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2023. EUROCRYPT 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14004. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30545-0_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30545-0_15

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