Shifting all data to the cloud have implications
for privacy and security. Although one possible
solution is to encrypt data before storage, encryption
alone is insufficient. Often data access patterns
reveal too much and must be protected.
Oblivious RAM (ORAM) eliminates this problem,
but the performance of existing constructions
is still unsatisfactory for clients with limited bandwidth
and storage capabilities. This article discusses
this problem overviewing the concept of
ORAM and proposing novel optimizations to
reduce the volume of data to be transferred per
data access. These optimizations are the key to
make ORAM more usable for personal storage,
as confirmed by our experiments.