MVP-ORAM Introduces Wait‑Free Concurrent Byzantine Fault‑Tolerant Oblivious RAM

Global: MVP-ORAM Introduces Wait‑Free Concurrent Byzantine Fault‑Tolerant Oblivious RAM

Researchers have introduced MVP-ORAM, a wait‑free oblivious RAM protocol designed to support multiple concurrent clients that may experience Byzantine faults, according to a recent arXiv preprint posted in December 2025. The protocol aims to address privacy gaps that arise from access‑pattern leakage when encrypted data is accessed.

Background on Data‑Access Privacy

While encryption protects the contents of data, it does not conceal the patterns of reads and writes, which can be exploited in inference attacks. Oblivious RAM (ORAM) techniques mitigate this risk by making client requests indistinguishable to observers.

Limitations of Existing ORAM Solutions

Prior ORAM constructions typically rely on trusted proxy servers or require inter‑client communication and distributed locking mechanisms. These dependencies constrain throughput and limit the ability to tolerate faulty or malicious clients.

Core Innovations of MVP-ORAM

MVP-ORAM eliminates the need for trusted proxies and avoids explicit concurrency‑control protocols. Instead, it enables clients to issue requests independently and merges conflicting updates on the fly, thereby achieving wait‑freedom—clients progress regardless of the performance or failures of others.

Redefined Obliviousness Guarantee

Because absolute obliviousness and wait‑freedom are mutually exclusive in asynchronous settings, the authors define a weaker, workload‑dependent notion of obliviousness. The protocol is proven secure for scenarios where client accesses are skewed across storage blocks.

Integration with Byzantine Fault‑Tolerant Stores

The wait‑free property allows MVP-ORAM to be incorporated into existing confidential Byzantine fault‑tolerant (BFT) data stores, creating the first BFT‑compatible ORAM construction.

Performance Evaluation

Prototype testing on a confidential BFT data store demonstrates that MVP-ORAM can handle hundreds of 4KB accesses per second in contemporary cloud environments.

This report is based on information from arXiv, licensed under Academic Preprint / Open Access. Based on the abstract of the research paper. Full text available via ArXiv.