Concealing Access Patterns

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Brief Description: Many organizations and individuals encrypt data that they store in the cloud to achieve confidentiality and privacy. However, when this data is accessed interactively (such as through a cloud storage service like Dropbox or Skydrive), this encryption isn't enough to ensure privacy. By observing the locations of the accessed data, attackers can often easily recover information about the encrypted data without ever needing to decrypt it.  To address this problem, researchers at UC Berkeley have developed Oblivious RAM (ORAM) software for securely concealing a client's access patterns to data residing in a cloud environment. This enables files to not only be encrypted, but it also prevents attackers (and even the cloud service provide itself) from determining which files (or portions of files) the client is accessing. Furthermore, the Berkeley ORAM software contains techniques for achieving practical performance under realistic scenarios as well as reducing network latency and memory requirements. This development includes a framework that is extensible and readily combined with other algorithms.  Suggested Uses: This Berkeley ORAM software is compatible with popular cloud storage services (i.e Microsot, Amazon, Google, Dropbox, etc), and accordingly it could be positioned as a security feature to enhance existing cloud storage services. Likewise, this software could also be used to enhance security on private networks. Advantages: Solutions to this ORAM problem have existed since 1987, but have not been commercializable due to their enormous internet bandwidth requirements. For example, existing solutions require that the client transfer gigabytes of information to the cloud in order to upload a single megabyte of data. In contrast, the Berkeley approach requires at least 63 times less bandwidth than existing approaches.