Pantheon: Private Retrieval from Public Key-Value Store

• Published in: Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment 2022-12, Vol.16 (4), p.643-656
• Main Authors: Ahmad, Ishtiyaque, Agrawal, Divyakant, Abbadi, Amr El, Gupta, Trinabh
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2150-8097; 2150-8097
• DOI: 10.14778/3574245.3574251

Consider a cloud server that owns a key-value store and provides a private query service to its clients. Preserving client privacy in this setting is difficult because the key-value store is public , and a client cannot encrypt or modify it. Therefore, privacy in this context implies hiding the access pattern of a client. Pantheon is a system that cryptographically allows a client to retrieve the value corresponding to a key from a public key-value store without allowing the server or any adversary to know any information about the key or value accessed. Pantheon devises a single-round retrieval protocol which reduces server-side latency by refining its cryptographic machinery and massively parallelizing the query execution workload. Using these novel techniques, Pantheon achieves a 93X improvement for server-side latency over a state-of-the-art solution.