The recent developments in the field of privacy-preserving technologies and secure data processing have shown a significant shift towards enhancing the efficiency and practicality of oblivious algorithms and systems. Researchers are focusing on overcoming the inherent challenges of deploying secure computation methods, such as Oblivious Random Access Memory (ORAM) and Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), in real-world applications. The emphasis is on developing algorithms that not only ensure data confidentiality and user privacy but also maintain or improve upon the performance benchmarks of their insecure counterparts. Innovations include the introduction of novel sorting-based algorithms for multi-way join processing that are both cache-agnostic and match the time complexity of insecure algorithms, the design of location-unaware relay selection algorithms for Tor that leverage Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) to defend against routing attacks, and the development of practical privacy-preserving Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) that integrate seamlessly with existing infrastructure while significantly reducing computation and communication costs. Additionally, there is a notable advancement in the distributed setting with the introduction of efficient oblivious join algorithms that prevent leakage on both the network and enclave sides, supporting general equi-join operations with superior communication and computation costs.

Noteworthy Papers

• Optimal Oblivious Algorithms for Multi-way Joins: Introduces a novel sorting-based algorithm for multi-way join processing that is provably oblivious, matching the time complexity of insecure algorithms up to a logarithmic factor.
• RPKI-Based Location-Unaware Tor Guard Relay Selection Algorithms: Proposes new guard relay selection algorithms leveraging RPKI, significantly increasing the number of ROA-ROV matched client-relay pairs with minimal performance overhead.
• OblivCDN: A Practical Privacy-preserving CDN with Oblivious Content Access: Presents a privacy-preserving CDN system that integrates with existing infrastructure, demonstrating remarkable performance improvements in real-world streaming evaluations.
• Jodes: Efficient Oblivious Join in the Distributed Setting: Develops an efficient oblivious join algorithm in the distributed setting, achieving up to a sixfold performance improvement over state-of-the-art join algorithms.