Paper 2025/1057 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2025/1057 ↗

Efficient Mixed-Mode Oblivious RAMs

Abstract

Oblivious RAMs (ORAMs) allow data outsourcing to servers so that the access pattern to the outsourced data is kept private. It is also a crucial building block to enable private RAM access within secure multi-party computation (MPC). In recent years, schemes that match the ORAM lower bound have been proposed in both the outsourcing setting and the RAM-model MPC setting, seemingly putting an epilogue in the theory of ORAM. In this paper, we initiate a study of mixed-mode ORAMs, where accesses to the ORAM are a mix of both public and private accesses. Although existing ORAMs can support public access by treating them as private ones, achieving better efficiency is highly non-trivial. - We present a mixed-mode ORAM algorithm, assuming the existence of private information retrieval (PIR). When the PIR scheme is communication-efficient, this ORAM achieves the best possible outcome: it has a bandwidth blowup of $O(\log N)$ for private accesses and $O(1)$ for public accesses. This construction can be easily extended for the MPC setting achieving $O(B\log N )$ circuit size for private accesses to $B$-sized blocks and $O(B)$ circuit size for public accesses to the same array. - We instantiate the above protocol in the three-party computation (3PC) setting with more concrete optimizations, yielding a protocol that performs almost as efficiently as state-of-the-art RAM-3PC protocols for private accesses while being $3\times$ more efficient for public accesses in the LAN setting.