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Hashing Beats Trees: Practical Oblivious Dictionaries in SGX
eprint.iacr.orgpaper

Hashing Beats Trees: Practical Oblivious Dictionaries in SGX

An IACR ePrint paper by Erik-Oliver Blass and Travis Mayberry proposing oblivious probabilistic hash tables (chaining, power-of-two-choices, stash-less cuckoo, de-amortized cuckoo hashing) built over Path ORAM as a replacement for oblivious AVL trees when deployed inside Intel SGX enclaves. It shows that SGX's small trusted client memory lets the position map recursion be shrunk to ≤3 levels, making constant-access hash tables beat Θ(log n) tree traversal, and derives via large-scale simulation the concrete padding parameters needed for "double obliviousness" (bounding hash-table rebuild probability to ≤2^-40) that prior ORAM literature lacked. Their SGX implementation reports up to 20x faster lookups and 12x faster inserts than oblivious-tree baselines.

TL;DR New oblivious-hash-table constructions over Path ORAM give 12-20x faster lookups/inserts than oblivious AVL trees inside SGX enclaves, with concrete anti-leakage padding parameters derived by simulation.

Organisations named here

  • Erik-Oliver Blass
  • Travis Mayberry

Technologies named here

  • Path ORAM
  • Intel SGX
  • Oblivious AVL tree

Techniques named here

  • Oblivious probabilistic hash tables over Path ORAM
  • Position map recursion reduction
  • Double obliviousness
  • Large-scale simulation for padding parameter derivation