SoK: Cryptographically Protected Database Search

Protected database search systems cryptographically isolate the roles of reading from, writing to, and administering the database. This separation limits unnecessary administrator access and protects data in the case of system breaches. Since protected search was introduced in 2000, the area has grown rapidly; systems are offered by academia, start-ups, and established companies. However, there is no best protected search system or set of techniques. Design of such systems is a balancing act between security, functionality, performance, and usability. This challenge is made more difficult by ongoing database specialization, as some users will want the functionality of SQL, NoSQL, or NewSQL databases. This database evolution will continue, and the protected search community should be able to quickly provide functionality consistent with newly invented databases. At the same time, the community must accurately and clearly characterize the tradeoffs between different approaches. To address these challenges, we provide the following contributions: 1) An identification of the important primitive operations across database paradigms. We find there are a small number of base operations that can be used and combined to support a large number of database paradigms. 2) An evaluation of the current state of protected search systems in implementing these base operations. This evaluation describes the main approaches and tradeoffs for each base operation. Furthermore, it puts protected search in the context of unprotected search, identifying key gaps in functionality. 3) An analysis of attacks against protected search for different base queries. 4) A roadmap and tools for transforming a protected search system into a protected database, including an open-source performance evaluation platform and initial user opinions of protected search.Comment: 20 pages, to appear to IEEE Security and Privac

Handling Confidential Data on the Untrusted Cloud: An Agent-based Approach

Cloud computing allows shared computer and storage facilities to be used by a multitude of clients. While cloud management is centralized, the information resides in the cloud and information sharing can be implemented via off-the-shelf techniques for multiuser databases. Users, however, are very diffident for not having full control over their sensitive data. Untrusted database-as-a-server techniques are neither readily extendable to the cloud environment nor easily understandable by non-technical users. To solve this problem, we present an approach where agents share reserved data in a secure manner by the use of simple grant-and-revoke permissions on shared data.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figures, Cloud Computing 201

CryptDB: A Practical Encrypted Relational DBMS

CryptDB is a DBMS that provides provable and practical privacy in the face of a compromised database server or curious database administrators. CryptDB works by executing SQL queries over encrypted data. At its core are three novel ideas: an SQL-aware encryption strategy that maps SQL operations to encryption schemes, adjustable query-based encryption which allows CryptDB to adjust the encryption level of each data item based on user queries, and onion encryption to efficiently change data encryption levels. CryptDB only empowers the server to execute queries that the users requested, and achieves maximum privacy given the mix of queries issued by the users. The database server fully evaluates queries on encrypted data and sends the result back to the client for final decryption; client machines do not perform any query processing and client-side applications run unchanged. Our evaluation shows that CryptDB has modest overhead: on the TPC-C benchmark on Postgres, CryptDB reduces throughput by 27% compared to regular Postgres. Importantly, CryptDB does not change the innards of existing DBMSs: we realized the implementation of CryptDB using client-side query rewriting/encrypting, user-defined functions, and server-side tables for public key information. As such, CryptDB is portable; porting CryptDB to MySQL required changing 86 lines of code, mostly at the connectivity layer

Using secret sharing for searching in encrypted data

When outsourcing data to an untrusted database server, the data should be encrypted. When using thin clients or low-bandwidth networks it is best to perform most of the work at the server. We present a method, inspired by secure multi-party computation, to search efficiently in encrypted data. XML elements are translated to polynomials. A polynomial is split into two parts: a random polynomial for the client and the difference between the original polynomial and the client polynomial for the server. Since the client polynomials are generated by a random sequence generator only the seed has to be stored on the client. In a combined effort of both the server and the client a query can be evaluated without traversing the whole tree and without the server learning anything about the data or the query

DCMS: A data analytics and management system for molecular simulation

Molecular Simulation (MS) is a powerful tool for studying physical/chemical features of large systems and has seen applications in many scientific and engineering domains. During the simulation process, the experiments generate a very large number of atoms and intend to observe their spatial and temporal relationships for scientific analysis. The sheer data volumes and their intensive interactions impose significant challenges for data accessing, managing, and analysis. To date, existing MS software systems fall short on storage and handling of MS data, mainly because of the missing of a platform to support applications that involve intensive data access and analytical process. In this paper, we present the database-centric molecular simulation (DCMS) system our team developed in the past few years. The main idea behind DCMS is to store MS data in a relational database management system (DBMS) to take advantage of the declarative query interface (i.e., SQL), data access methods, query processing, and optimization mechanisms of modern DBMSs. A unique challenge is to handle the analytical queries that are often compute-intensive. For that, we developed novel indexing and query processing strategies (including algorithms running on modern co-processors) as integrated components of the DBMS. As a result, researchers can upload and analyze their data using efficient functions implemented inside the DBMS. Index structures are generated to store analysis results that may be interesting to other users, so that the results are readily available without duplicating the analysis. We have developed a prototype of DCMS based on the PostgreSQL system and experiments using real MS data and workload show that DCMS significantly outperforms existing MS software systems. We also used it as a platform to test other data management issues such as security and compression

A secure data outsourcing scheme based on Asmuth – Bloom secret sharing

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Data outsourcing is an emerging paradigm for data management in which a database is provided as a service by third-party service providers. One of the major benefits of offering database as a service is to provide organisations, which are unable to purchase expensive hardware and software to host their databases, with efficient data storage accessible online at a cheap rate. Despite that, several issues of data confidentiality, integrity, availability and efficient indexing of users’ queries at the server side have to be addressed in the data outsourcing paradigm. Service providers have to guarantee that their clients’ data are secured against internal (insider) and external attacks. This paper briefly analyses the existing indexing schemes in data outsourcing and highlights their advantages and disadvantages. Then, this paper proposes a secure data outsourcing scheme based on Asmuth–Bloom secret sharing which tries to address the issues in data outsourcing such as data confidentiality, availability and order preservation for efficient indexing

Access control technologies for Big Data management systems: literature review and future trends

Abstract Data security and privacy issues are magnified by the volume, the variety, and the velocity of Big Data and by the lack, up to now, of a reference data model and related data manipulation languages. In this paper, we focus on one of the key data security services, that is, access control, by highlighting the differences with traditional data management systems and describing a set of requirements that any access control solution for Big Data platforms may fulfill. We then describe the state of the art and discuss open research issues