Paper 2025/358

The Complexity of Memory Checking with Covert Security

Abstract

A memory checker is an algorithmic tool used to certify the integrity of a database maintained on a remote, unreliable, computationally bounded server. Concretely, it allows a user to issue instructions to the server and after every instruction, obtain either the correct value or a failure (but not an incorrect answer) with high probability. A recent result due to Boyle, Komargodski, and Vafa (BKV, STOC '24) showed a tradeoff between the size of the local storage and the number of queries the memory checker makes to the server upon every logical instruction. Specifically, they show that every non-trivial memory checker construction with inverse-polynomial soundness and local storage at most $n^{1 - \epsilon}$ must make $\Omega(\log n/ \log \log n)$ queries, and this is tight up to constant factors given known constructions. However, an intriguing question is whether natural relaxations of the security guarantee could allow for more efficient constructions. We consider and adapt the notion of covert security to the memory checking context, wherein the adversary can effectively cheat while taking the risk of being caught with constant probability. Notably, BKV's lower bound does not apply in this setting. We close this gap and prove that $\Omega(\log n/ \log \log n)$ overhead is unavoidable even in the covert security setting. Our lower bound applies to any memory checker construction, including ones that use randomness and adaptivity and ones that rely on cryptographic assumptions and/or the random oracle model, as long as they satisfy a natural "read-only reads" property. This property requires a memory checker not to modify contents of the database or local storage in the execution of a logical read instruction.