[Bug Smash] The Amnesiac ORAM: Fixing Oblivious RAM That Forgot Everything
This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Clear the Lineup powered by Sentry . Project Overview I've been working on Styx OS — a custom x86-64 microkernel I'm building completely from scratch. It handles everything from the bootloader up through a capability-based userspace. The whole philosophy behind Styx OS is that you shouldn't even trust your own hardware. So, it packs in features…
This is a story about a programmer who worked on Styx OS, a custom x86-64 microkernel. His latest experimental feature was adapting PathORAM, or Oblivious RAM, to physical USB storage. The core issue was that the ORAM tree was stored in RAM, making it vulnerable to attacks since an attacker could monitor the physical access pattern on the disk.
The programmer realized that the ORAM tree should be wired directly to the USB Mass Storage driver to map every read and write to physical Logical Block Addresses (LBAs). He made these changes, creating a more secure system.
However, writing the position map to the USB drive on every single access proved to be a significant I/O bottleneck. The programmer decided to prioritize security and crash-consistency over raw speed, noting that journaling or batching these writes could be a possible improvement in the future.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
