cto & general partner @paradigm. ceo /ithaca. working with /rust on /ethereum. building /reth and /foundry. https://gakonst.com

kicking uss off, Elaine Shi talking about ORAM -- "Oblivious RAM"

TLDR even if you have confidential compute, querying the DB can leak sensitive information via your access patterns

an easy way to think about ORAM is that it "encrypts" the access patterns,

for every query, it generates multiple accesses, and you're unable to distinguish which one is the right one - almost like a noising process

Shi's team is developing "oblivious-stl", an ORAM-enabled version of Cpp stl, the top use case in my mind for ORAM is Flashbots/SUAVE - allowing anyone to run Suave nodes will require having a mechanism for preventing MEV Stealing, this is enabled by the combination of SGX + ORAM (just SGX is not enough)

so you run the oram algo inside of your enclave, and you get both encrypted compute and unable to correlate which gives you both confidential compute and db queries

but this has been hard to make practical due to large constants