Light-weight Preservation of Access Pattern Privacy in Un-trusted Storage

With the emergence of cloud computing, more and more sensitive user data are outsourced to remote storage servers. The privacy of users’ access pattern to the data should be protected to prevent un-trusted storage servers from inferring users’ private information or launching stealthy attacks. Meanwhile, the privacy protection schemes should be efficient as cloud users often use thin client devices to access the data. In this paper, we propose a lightweight scheme to protect the privacy of data access pattern. Comparing with existing state-of-the-art solutions, our scheme incurs less communication and computational overhead, requires significantly less storage space at the user side, while consuming similar storage space at the server. Rigorous proofs and extensive evaluations have been conducted to show that the proposed scheme can hide the data access pattern effectively in the long run after a reasonable number of accesses have been made.