
Oblix: an efficient oblivious search index - severine
https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/07/06/oblix-an-efficient-oblivious-search-index/
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severine
I posted this, but I really don't know anything about it, I'm just a reader.
Anyway, it sounded very interesting, so I wanted to see if knowledgeable
people here could discuss it further.

It's on the front page (yay!), but no comments so far. I wonder, are you
reading it and pondering the implications or have you dismissed it after
reading? (cynically, I guess there would be a lot of comments if that was the
case.)

Is this exciting for you? Trivial?

~~~
throwawaymath
_> I posted this, but I really don't know anything about it, I'm just a
reader. Anyway, it sounded very interesting, so I wanted to see if
knowledgeable people here could discuss it further._

In cryptography, "oblivious" protocols allow users to interact with data in a
way that is independent from the underlying memory locations of the data. In
other words, you cannot infer anything about the data based on its
distribution or access patterns in memory addresses.

The foundation of this concept is oblivious RAM (ORAM), which is a memory
model that (simply speaking) makes many redundant calls and operations to
memory addresses so that the memory addresses associated with relevant data
are obscured (compare with the idea of "padding" operations to make them
constant time against side channels). The current state of the art ORAM
schemes have O(log _n_ ) complexity per access, for data size _n_.

Now on top of the oblivious memory model we have oblivious data structures,
like search indices. Therefore this article is describing an oblivious data
structure, which requires its own protocol development and complexity study
separate from the underlying ORAM.

