Waffle: An Online Oblivious Datastore for Protecting Data Access Patterns

Sujaya Maiyya, Sharath Chandra Vemula, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi, Florian Kerschbaum

Abstract: We present Waffle, a datastore that protects an application’s data access patterns from a passive persistent adversary. Waffle achieves this without prior knowledge of the input data access distribution, making it the first of its kind to adaptively handle input sequences under a passive persistent adversary. Waffle maintains a constant bandwidth and client-side storage overhead, which can be adjusted to suit the application owner’s preferences. This flexibility allows the owner to fine-tune system parameters and strike a balance between security and performance. Our evaluation, utilizing the Yahoo! Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB) benchmark and Redis as the backend storage, demonstrates promising results. The insecure baseline outperforms Waffle by a mere 5-6x, whereas Waffle outperforms Pancake—a state-of-the-art oblivious datastore under passive persistent adversaries—by 45-57%, and a concurrent ORAM system, TaoStore, by 102x.