Toward efficient data access privacy in the cloud

Shifting all data to the cloud have implications for privacy and security. Although one possible solution is to encrypt data before storage, encryption alone is insufficient. Often data access patterns reveal too much and must be protected. Oblivious RAM (ORAM) eliminates this problem, but the performance of existing constructions is still unsatisfactory for clients with limited bandwidth and storage capabilities. This article discusses this problem overviewing the concept of ORAM and proposing novel optimizations to reduce the volume of data to be transferred per data access. These optimizations are the key to make ORAM more usable for personal storage, as confirmed by our experiments.