DataLair: Efficient Block Storage with Plausible Deniability against Multi-Snapshot Adversaries

Sensitive information is present on our phones, disks, watches and computers. Its protection is essential. Plausible deniability of stored data allows individuals to deny that their device contains a piece of sensitive information. This constitutes a key tool in the fight against oppressive governments and censorship. Unfortunately, existing solutions, such as the now defunct TrueCrypt, can defend only against an adversary that can access a users device at most once (single-snapshot adversary). Recent solutions have traded significant performance overheads for the ability to handle more powerful adversaries, that are able to access the device at multiple points in time (multi-snapshot adversary). In this paper we show that this sacrifice is not necessary. We introduce and build DataLair, a practical plausible deniability mechanism. When compared with existing approaches, DataLair is two orders of magnitude faster for public data accesses, and 5 times faster for hidden data accesses. An important component in DataLair is a new write-only ORAM construction which improves on the complexity of the state of the art write-only ORAM by a factor of O(logN ), where N denotes the underlying storage disk size.