Pantheon: Private Retrieval from Public Key-Value Store

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 93× improvement for server-side latency over a state-of-the-art solution.