Surpassing the Scalability Bottleneck of Oblivious Storage
Raluca Ada Popa (UC Berkeley)
Calvin Lab Auditorium
Abstract: Existing oblivious storage systems provide strong security by hiding access patterns, but do not scale to sustain high throughput as they rely on a central point of coordination. To overcome this scalability bottleneck, I will present Snoopy, an object store that is both oblivious and scalable such that adding more machines increases system throughput. Snoopy contributes techniques tailored to the high-throughput regime to securely distribute and efficiently parallelize every system component without prohibitive coordination costs. These techniques enable Snoopy to scale similarly to a plaintext storage system. Snoopy achieves 13.7× higher throughput than Obladi, a state-of-the-art oblivious storage system. Specifically, Obladi reaches a throughput of 6.7K requests/s for two million 160-byte objects and cannot scale beyond a proxy and server machine. For the same data size, Snoopy uses 18 machines to scale to 92K requests/s with average latency under 500ms.
Bio: Raluca Ada Popa is the Robert E. and Beverly A. Brooks associate professor of computer science at UC Berkeley working in computer security, systems, and applied cryptography. She is a co-founder and co-director of the RISELab and SkyLab at UC Berkeley, as well as a co-founder & President of Opaque Systems, and a co-founder of PreVeil, two cybersecurity startups. Raluca has received her PhD in computer science as well as her Masters and two BS degrees, in computer science and in mathematics, from MIT. She is the recipient of the 2021 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship award, Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award at OSDI, Jim and Donna Gray Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award, NSF Career, Technology Review 35 Innovators under 35, Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, and a George M. Sprowls Award for best MIT CS doctoral thesis.