A team of UCSB Computer Science researchers just won the EDBT 2018 Best Demonstration Award at Vienna, Austria. The EDBT (Extending Data Base Technology)  (http://edbticdt2018.at/) conference is a well-known conference in the area of databases and information systems. 

Pharos: Privacy Hazards of Replicating ORAM Stores.  
Victor Zakhary, UCSB; Cetin Sahin, University of California, Santa Barbara; Amr El Abbadi, UCSB; Huijia (Rachel) Lin, UCSB; Stefano Tessaro, UCSB.

Abstract:
Although outsourcing data to cloud storage has become popular, the increasing concerns about data security and privacy in the cloud blocks broader cloud adoption. Recent efforts have developed oblivious storage systems to hide both the data content and the data access patterns from an untrusted cloud provider. These systems have shown great progress in improving the efficiency of oblivious accesses. However, these systems mainly focus on privacy without considering fault-tolerance of different system components. This makes prior proposals impractical for cloud applications that require 24/7 availability. In this demonstration, we propose Pharos, the Privacy Hazards of Replicating ORAM Stores.We aim to highlight the data access pattern privacy hazards of naively applying common database replication and operation execution techniques such as locking and asymmetric quorums.

Congratulations Victor, Cetin, Amr, Rachel, and Stefano!