Hierarchical Role-Based Access Control with Homomorphic Encryption for Database as a Service

Database as a service provides services for accessing and managing customers data which provides ease of access, and the cost is less for these services. There is a possibility that the DBaaS service provider may not be trusted, and data may be stored on untrusted server. The access control mechanism can restrict users from unauthorized access, but in cloud environment access control policies are more flexible. However, an attacker can gather sensitive information for a malicious purpose by abusing the privileges as another user and so database security is compromised. The other problems associated with the DBaaS are to manage role hierarchy and secure session management for query transaction in the database. In this paper, a role-based access control for the multitenant database with role hierarchy is proposed. The query is granted with least access privileges, and a session key is used for session management. The proposed work protects data from privilege escalation and SQL injection. It uses the partial homomorphic encryption (Paillier Encryption) for the encrypting the sensitive data. If a query is to perform any operation on sensitive data, then extra permissions are required for accessing sensitive data. Data confidentiality and integrity are achieved using the role-based access control with partial homomorphic encryption.Comment: 11 Pages,4 figures, Proceedings of International Conference on ICT for Sustainable Developmen

Security and privacy aspects of mobile applications for post-surgical care

Mobile technologies have the potential to improve patient monitoring, medical decision making and in general the efficiency and quality of health delivery. They also pose new security and privacy challenges. The objectives of this work are to (i) Explore and define security and privacy requirements on the example of a post-surgical care application, and (ii) Develop and test a pilot implementation Post-Surgical Care Studies of surgical out- comes indicate that timely treatment of the most common complications in compliance with established post-surgical regiments greatly improve success rates. The goal of our pilot application is to enable physician to optimally synthesize and apply patient directed best medical practices to prevent post-operative complications in an individualized patient/procedure specific fashion. We propose a framework for a secure protocol to enable doctors to check most common complications for their patient during in-hospital post- surgical care. We also implemented our construction and cryptographic protocols as an iPhone application on the iOS using existing cryptographic services and libraries

Shared and searchable encrypted data for untrusted servers

Current security mechanisms are not suitable for organisations that outsource their data management to untrusted servers. Encrypting and decrypting sensitive data at the client side is the normal approach in this situation but has high communication and computation overheads if only a subset of the data is required, for example, selecting records in a database table based on a keyword search. New cryptographic schemes have been proposed that support encrypted queries over encrypted data. But they all depend on a single set of secret keys, which implies single user access or sharing keys among multiple users, with key revocation requiring costly data re-encryption. In this paper, we propose an encryption scheme where each authorised user in the system has his own keys to encrypt and decrypt data. The scheme supports keyword search which enables the server to return only the encrypted data that satisfies an encrypted query without decrypting it. We provide a concrete construction of the scheme and give formal proofs of its security. We also report on the results of our implementation

Some Potential Issues with the Security of HTML5 IndexedDB

The new HTML5 standard provides much more access to client resources, such as user location and local data storage. Unfortunately, this greater access may create new security risks that potentially can yield new threats to user privacy and web attacks. One of these security risks lies with the HTML5 client-side database. It appears that data stored on the client file system is unencrypted. Therefore, any stored data might be at risk of exposure. This paper explains and performs a security investigation into how the data is stored on client local file systems. The investigation was undertaken using Firefox and Chrome web browsers, and Encase (a computer forensic tool), was used to examine the stored data. This paper describes how the data can be retrieved after an application deletes the client side database. Finally, based on our findings, we propose a solution to correct any potential issues and security risks, and recommend ways to store data securely on local file systems

Flexible Yet Secure De-Duplication Service for Enterprise Data on Cloud Storage

The cloud storage services bring forth infinite storage capacity and flexible access capability to store and share large-scale content. The convenience brought forth has attracted both individual and enterprise users to outsource data service to a cloud provider. As the survey shows 56% of the usages of cloud storage applications are for data back up and up to 68% of data backup are user assets. Enterprise tenants would need to protect their data privacy before uploading them to the cloud and expect a reasonable performance while they try to reduce the operation cost in terms of cloud storage, capacity and I/Os matter as well as systems’ performance, bandwidth and data protection. Thus, enterprise tenants demand secure and economic data storage yet flexible access on their cloud data. In this paper, we propose a secure de-duplication solution for enterprise tenants to leverage the benefits of cloud storage while reducing operation cost and protecting privacy. First, the solution uses a proxy to do flexible group access control which supports secure de-duplication within a group; Second, the solution supports scalable clustering of proxies to support large-scale data access; Third, the solution can be integrated with cloud storage seamlessly. We implemented and tested our solution by integrating it with Dropbox. Secure de-duplication in a group is performed at low data transfer latency and small storage overhead as compared to de-duplication on plaintext