VDORAM: Towards a Random Access Machine with Both Public Verifiability and Distributed Obliviousness
Huayi Qi
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2026 · Day 1 · Distributed Computation
This talk addresses a fundamental gap at the intersection of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) and secure multi-party computation (MPC): how do you prove to the public that a collaborative computation among multiple parties was performed correctly, without any party revealing their secret inputs? The researchers introduce **VDORAM** (Verifiable Distributed Oblivious RAM), a system that achieves both **public verifiability** (anyone can verify the computation was correct via a ZKP) and **distributed obliviousness** (no party learns another's secrets, as in MPC). The key technical contribution is a novel **compat circuit** representation that unifies MPC evaluation and ZKP constraint generation, along with new MPC protocols for comparison and equality testing in finite fields that produce all values needed to build valid ZKP constraints.
AI review
A theoretically motivated construction that combines ZKP public verifiability with MPC distributed obliviousness through a novel compat circuit abstraction. While the problem formulation is sound and the compat circuit is an elegant unification, the system is admittedly the slowest in its class, only runs on local networks, and has no practical deployment. This is pure cryptographic research with no near-term offensive or defensive application.